On a perishingly cold day I find myself talking with Harry Christophers, the world-acclaimed conductor and director of The Sixteen, about Lent. It has long struck me that most people seem to think that when it comes to liturgy this is a boring time of year. That wasn’t necessarily my experience when I helped run the music at Pusey House in Oxford many years ago, for the choir came into its own with unaccompanied music that tested the singers’ skills for several weeks at a time – and all first thing in the morning.
How does Christophers see the turning of the year from Christmastide into Lent, I wonder; how do music and fasting sit with him? “Frankly”, he says with relish, “I think some of the best music we have is written for Lent and Passiontide – from Renaissance composers particularly. I suppose in those days the accent on it was much, much more important than Christmas. If you look at England – Tallis, Sheppard, people like that – the number of pieces written for Christmas are minimal. Advent, yes, but Christmas less so.”
“The music for Passiontide in England is incredible,” he goes on, “and it was the same on the Continent. You only have to look at the number of versions of the Lamentations that are there; today most people who know about sacred music will talk about the Tallis Lamentations, but about how Robert Whyte’s five-part rendition – that takes some beating – and there are so many settings in Portugal, Spain, and so on. Loads and loads! And overseas they weren’t unaccompanied – they were written with parts for big continuo sections. Almeida in Portugal, Padilla in Mexico – they’re phenomenal pieces.”
“It’s the most important part of the Christian year,” Christophers says. “There’s a trajectory that starts right at the beginning of Lent right through Passiontide and the Sacred Triduum; there are so many wonderful pieces for this time of year.” We chuckle at the thought that apparently the best-known piece of Renaissance music in the world is Allegri’s Miserere, written for Holy Week in the Sistine Chapel and, as legend would have it, transcribed in 1770 by a young Mozart on tour. “You’re probably sick of it!” he says. Maybe I am, but I could have hit those top notes once.
We move on to Tenebrae, those haunting Holy Week offices with candles extinguished one by one and the strepitus – a loud and sudden noise at the end – as the faithful reflect on the coming Crucifixion with its gathering darkness and accompanying earthquake. “In more recent times there’s been a resurgence of interest in that time of year,” he says. “James MacMillan, for example: his Tenebrae Responsories are fearfully difficult, but fantastic; Cecilia McDowall’s written a Stabat Mater. John Studzinski and the Genesis Foundation have been commissioning pieces that really engage with the texts for many years now – one such set were known fondly as the ‘Mini-Maters’, works by Alissa Firsova, Matthew Martin and Tonu Korvits who all set selected verses from the Stabat Mater.”
He singles out MacMillan’s Stabat Mater for particular praise – all 60 minutes of it, with choir and orchestra. “It delves right into the substance; it digs at the text in a very personal way.” It strikes me that MacMillan deals in words, rather than tunes alone; Christophers thinks it’s a fair observation. “Gosh, yes. I’ve always thought of three composers in particular who go into the music in a very personal way. All Catholics, actually, but from very different traditions: Victoria, Poulenc. MacMillan.
“They all know their Bible incredibly well; they really know their texts. When Poulenc selected the verses for his Four Penitential Motets he chose words that meant something to him – they’re really personal. Sometimes you have to try and get inside the head of a composer to work out quite what the meaning of their music is. MacMillan’s Stabat Mater is similar – greater even than his Seven Last Words – and he doesn’t just treat the words. Instead he treats the whole atmosphere of the day itself, with Mary weeping and the crowd baying: it’s cinema-meets-religion. I think it’s a masterpiece.”
We agree that the right music can transport the listener to where the composer needs them to be – in the case of the Stabat Mater to the foot of the Cross, for example. Christophers reflects that it’s often slow pieces with profound words that have the deepest impact. The Sixteen are about to embark on their annual Choral Pilgrimage; this year it commemorates William Byrd’s four-hundredth anniversary. “You think of these pretty grim texts, like Infelix ego and Tristitia et anxietas – but, goodness me, the pieces are phenomenal and they have an incredible impact even on people who have no faith whatsoever.”
“They are moved by them,” he explains. “They dig deep. That’s the power of unaccompanied music. People who come realise the power of it. I’d urge anyone to test it out; to put their feet in the water and see what it does to them. It’s so powerful. There are pieces of music that really stick with you, and resonate – particularly in Lent. The Whyte Lamentations, for example. They are tear-jerkingly beautiful. They’re 20 minutes long, and you just get soaked up into them. It’s amazing.”
I put it to Christophers that The Sixteen’s audiences today perhaps represent the successors of the non-literate people who came to church 500 years ago and simply allowed the music to wash over them as they reflected on life and prayed their beads in the nave. Perhaps they are at less of an advantage, given the levels of religious literacy today. Nevertheless this music grabs them, shakes them, and often leaves them moved and struggling to find a response. Is that a fair assessment? He pauses for a moment and draws breath.
“I think it’s a very worrying thing”, he sighs, “that children of today know so little of the Bible”. It’s clearly a point of mental conflict. “It’s great that different religions are covered and taught in schools, but it means that 99 per cent of children have no idea about the stories of the Old Testament. Handel wrote so many oratorios about those subjects! And hardly anyone knows any Latin – fewer and fewer of the students on our Genesis Sixteen programme have learned any Latin at school. That’s quite frightening.” He apologises for getting onto what he calls one of his hobby-horses.
I don’t stop him, because it’s one of my own as well. What’s also frightening, he thinks, is going on in his local Anglican parish. “The new vicar was looking forward to being chaplain at two of the local primary schools – but they don’t have their carol services in the parish church any longer, because they want them to be secular instead. It’s such a pity. The children would get a real kick out of singing in a vast space and just because it’s in a church it doesn’t all have to be sacred music, does it?”
We could talk for hours about that, no doubt, but not today. “We’re in a world – a secular world – where this music can do some phenomenal good,” Christophers insists. “It’s not easy, but that’s my mission – as the Americans would say – that’s what I’m trying to do with The Sixteen. If people are resistant to entering a church then I try to encourage them to think of it as an historic building instead: ‘Just come and listen to the music and see what it does to you’.”
Who could reasonably argue with that?
The Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage for 2023, A Watchful Gaze, begins on March 11 in Oxford.
www.thesixteen.com
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