HM The King, with Dr Kadiatu Kanneh Mason (left) and Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly (right), presenting Royal Philharmonic Society Honorary Membership to Master of the King’s Music, Judith Weir.
A keen-eyed visitor to St James’s Church in London’s Spanish Place might be able to pick out two stone crowns high up on the north side of the sanctuary. These are the relics of a visit which Edward VII and Queen Alexandra made to the church on February 8, 1908. They had come to the church to attend a Requiem celebrated in memory of the recently-assassinated King of Portugal, Don Carlos, and his Crown Prince, Manuel. Edward VII, dressed as a Portuguese colonel, thus became the first British monarch to attend a Catholic Mass in an official capacity since the reign of James II.
This happy royal connection with St James’s was further enhanced on Tuesday June 6 when Edward’s great, great grandson, HM King Charles III, graced the church with his presence at a concert held under the auspices of the Wigmore Hall. Originally conceived as a tribute to mark the Platinum Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, the programme could not have been more apt as a celebration of the recent coronation of the new king containing, as it did, four of George Frideric Handel’s anthems written for the coronation of George II in 1727.
A fanfare written by the living composer Francois Saint-Yves greeted His Majesty’s arrival which was followed by the singing of the National Anthem (the first verse as a solo by the baritone Roderick Williams) before the audience settled down to listen to Handel’s “Dettingen Te Deum”.
The King’s determination to be present for the evening following on closely from his visit to Transylvania was a clear statement of his love of music, something underlined when, before the interval, he presented Honorary Membership of the Royal Philharmonic Society to Judith Weir, the Master of the King’s Music, from whom he had commissioned a piece for his own coronation.
It was a delicious irony that the perfor-mance was being given by Le Concert Spirituel, a French ensemble, within a Catholic church with long connections to Spain, of a piece commemorating the Hanoverian-British military victory over the French at Dettingen in 1743. Under the energetic direction of Hervé Niquet, the founder and conductor of Le Concert Spirituel, the second half of the concert was brought to a climax with a terrific rendering of “Zadok the Priest” which meant that His Majesty left the church on a very high note. Before that, a measured singing of “The King Shall Rejoice” seemed especially appropriate for the occasion.
As a former parish priest of St James’s, perhaps I may be allowed to express a general reserve as to the use of sacred spaces for secular events, but on this occasion the particular acoustic of the towering Gothic-revival splendour of the church married perfectly with the content which the Wigmore Hall, under the guidance of its splendid (and devoutly Catholic) director, John Gilhooly, had chosen for us. Over the past 35 years, Niquet has established his ensemble as a benchmark in the interpretation of the Baroque repertoire and having Le Concert Spirituel as the inaugural performance in the promised series, which will see the Wigmore Hall using the larger-scale venue available to them at Spanish Place, augurs well for what in one commentator’s view can become “an interesting enlargement of London’s concert life”. St James’s has its own long and excellent musical tradition: while Renaissance polyphony and Gregorian chant remain at its core, it also embraces a more varied repertoire in which the likes of Mozart and Haydn play a significant part.
It is to be hoped that at least some of the large audience who packed Spanish Place on June 6 will return to discover the parish’s rich liturgical life.
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