After his studies at Trinity College, Oxford, and a year at Leipzig, Basil Harwood pursued a career as an organist at St Barnabas’ Pimlico (1883-87), Ely Cathedral (1887-92), where this recording was made, and at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford (1892-1909). There, he threw himself into the thriving musical life of the city and university as the conductor of the Oxford Orchestral Association, the Oxford Bach Choir (its first director) and as the University Choragus (throughout Parry’s professorship); he was also editor of The Oxford Hymn Book. In 1909, somewhat unexpectedly, he inherited his father’s Gloucestershire estate and lived the life of a country gentleman for the next forty years. Though perhaps best known today for his two sturdy hymn tunes Luckington (‘Let all the world in every corner sing’) and Thornbury (‘Thy hand, O God, has guided’), he composed a good deal of music, including a body of organ works which, by dint of his brilliance as a pianist, is well known for its technical difficulty. This instrumental attribute is reflected in the substantial and highly florid organ introduction of O how glorious is the kingdom, composed in 1899, which subsequently underpins the chorale-like first subject of the anthem’s sonata structure. There follows a gentler, more lyrical second subject, initiated by the sopranos (‘Clothed with white robes, they follow the lamb’), which develops more contrapuntally throughout the full choir. Harwood’s recapitulation then restates both ideas, this time in the tonic key (D major), before the anthem concludes with a triumphal coda supported by a powerful tonic pedal.

A similar imposing organ introduction, quasi-orchestral in scale, is a major distinguishing feature of Henry Balfour Gardiner’s setting of the Latin Compline hymn ‘Te lucis ante terminum’ of 1908 (better known as the Evening Hymn), written while he held a very brief teaching position at Winchester College and in whose chapel it was first sung. The anthem is dedicated to the College’s organist, E T Sweeting. The almost Doric opening and closing sections of its ternary form, designed to convey the sense of prayer to the Creator, are chorally and harmonically dense in texture and language. This material contrasts markedly with the lighter, more mysterious central section which, gravitating to the relative minor at its cadence, alludes fittingly to the ‘nightly fears and fantasies’. The organ provides a transition (paralleling that of the opening) back to a reharmonized restatement of the first section, which functions as a doxology, replete with a flamboyant ‘Amen’ as the coda.

John Ireland produced his anthem Greater love hath no man while he was organist at St Luke’s, Chelsea. Written as a commission in 1912 for Charles Macpherson, the sub-organist of St Paul’s Cathedral, it was intended as a meditation for Passiontide and draws its text from a compilation of scriptural passages from Daily Light on the Daily Path, a series of booklets containing Bible readings which Ireland used to observe on a regular basis. The anthem rapidly gained currency in cathedrals and church choirs and, with the outbreak of war in 1914, its text gained a special resonance as the shadows of death and self-sacrifice enveloped the country. Greater love has a scope and narrative that is redolent of a small cantata, yet, at the same time, the solo material for soprano and bass is reminiscent of the older English style of verse anthem, though composed here with a greater sense of interaction and ‘dialogue’ between soloists and chorus; indeed, there are moments when the full chorus assumes the role of ‘turba’ in contrast to its more normal role of reflective commentary. Much of the success of Greater love is due to its judiciously designed textual and tonal structure. Though still couched in a style aromatic of Parry and Elgar (witness the ‘nobilmente’ choral statement ‘that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness’ and the even more climactic ‘that ye should shew forth the praises’), there is much in the anthem, particularly the passages for soloists and the restful ending (‘I beseech you brethren’), which exudes the more personal, nostalgic voice of Ireland’s songs and piano music.

A native of Yorkshire and considered to be one of the ‘rudest’ men in the county on account of his blunt speaking, Edward Bairstow spent most of his career as organist of York Minster and as the non-resident Professor of Music at Durham University. Dating from 1914, Blessed city, heavenly Salem was composed for the choirs of All Saints and Heaton Parish Churches, Bradford. Conceived as an anthem for saints’ days or festival dedications, the anthem is cast in an imaginative through-composed structure in which the six strains of the plainsong Sarum melody ‘Urbs beata Hierusalem’ (which became well known as an Anglican hymn in Hymns Ancient and Modern in an English translation by John Mason Neale) are subject to a series of inventive and elaborate choral variations. It is also this pervasive presence of the plainsong which gives the anthem its striking modal flavour. The whole anthem is overtly orchestral in demeanour (the anthem is indeed available in the composer’s own arrangement for strings, piano or organ), but no more so than in the climactic emotional transition for the organ which occurs directly after the choral statement ‘Nevermore to leave the temple’. This eventually subsides to a final, deeply affecting variation in B flat minor where the plainsong takes the form of a solemn chorale, decorated by a solo soprano countermelody that is somewhat reminiscent of Elgar with its yearning sequences. The resolving tierce de Picardie in the final bars remains one of the most rapt moments in English cathedral music. Another orchestral anthem, Lord, thou hast been our refuge was commissioned for the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy in 1916. Imparting a sentiment generated by the turbulence of war, this anthem, one of Bairstow’s most substantial and ingenious, takes its text from Psalms 90, 102 and 144. The first part assumes the form of a sonata rondo in which the opening choral statement (‘Lord, thou hast been our refuge’), in A major, contrasts with secondary material in F major based on the text ‘Before the mountains’, and a further episode in F minor (‘Lord, what is man’). This generous paragraph culminates in a recomposed restatement of both ideas in the tonic key before yielding to a second sonata structure, which commences with a fugue (‘Thou shalt arise’) based in A major, and a celestial contrasting statement (‘Comfort us again’) in a radiant F sharp major. This ethereal departure incorporates strains of the earlier rondo theme which continues as a more tonally fluid development, out of which A major is restored, marked by allusions to the fugue and ‘Comfort us again’, which brings the anthem to an otherworldly conclusion.

A slightly older contemporary of Bairstow’s, Charles Wood resided for most of his life in Cambridge where he was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College and director of chapel music there. Published in 1915, the rousing O thou, the central orb sets words by the Oxford clergyman and hymnologist Henry Ramsden Bramley, who wrote his Petrarchian sonnet at the behest of Sir Frederick Ouseley so it could be used as a new text for Orlando Gibbons’s 1619 anthem O all true faithful hearts. Wood adopted an uncomplicated ternary form for his interpretation of the poem, the outer sections deploying a muscular diatonicism in A flat major, while the central paragraph explores a wider range of tonalities with excursions to F minor, D flat and C flat major. The moving elegy Expectans expectavi (‘I waited expectantly’) was composed by Wood in 1919 in memory of his son Patrick Wood and of Charles Hamilton Sorley, both of whom were killed in the war. Sorley, the son of a close Cambridge friend—William Ritchie Sorley, Professor of Moral Philosophy at Cambridge—was a gifted poet whose words Wood took from Marlborough and other poems, published posthumously in 1919 by Cambridge University Press. Expectans expectavi is the high-water mark of Wood’s Romantic church music. Its intense, yearning diatonic language, epitomized by the opening wistful lyricism of the organ, the rich dominant-thirteenth harmony (enhanced by the co-existent ninth and eleventh) and the plaintive opening for the choir (‘This sanctuary of my soul’), is deeply memorable. Equally adroit is the manner in which Wood integrates the opening organ theme and dominant thirteenth into the choral material. A prudently crafted tonal plan, in which D flat and A major are subtly contrasted, and a sonata form full of dexterous variation (including the beautifully modified recapitulation and the haunting ‘memory’ of the main theme before the close) serve perfectly to underpin the introspective warmth of Sorley’s verse.

A member of the teaching staff at the Royal College of Music from 1925, and Professor of Music at Cambridge between 1946 and 1962, Patrick Hadley completed his short anthem My beloved spake (using the famous verses 10-13 of Solomon 2) in his hometown of Heacham in Norfolk on 20 April 1936. Written specially for one his RCM students, Ursula Grotrian, on her marriage in Ripon Cathedral in May, this exquisite miniature was also suitable, as the composer specified in the published edition of 1938, to be sung in the spring. The key musical event of Hadley’s through-composed scheme is the ascent to the climactic second-inversion chord (‘Rise up’) in the tonic, B flat major, at the beginning of bar 4, and a second, quieter rejoinder (‘and come away’) also in second inversion. A second climax occurs at the peak of the anthem’s tonal dissolution, but this time on a D flat second-inversion chord (‘Arise my love’), a gesture which throws into relief the hushed and telling return of B flat (‘away’) from the anthem’s opening.

A one-time chorister at Wakefield Cathedral, before embarking (somewhat unwillingly) on a career in academia at Oxford and Edinburgh Universities, Kenneth Leighton is well known for his corpus of church music even though, like Parry, Vaughan Williams and Howells, he did not hold conventional Christian beliefs. Let all the world in every corner sing, a setting of George Herbert’s metaphysical poem, was commissioned for St Matthew’s Church, Northampton, in 1965 and first sung there on 20 September (the eve of the Feast of St Matthew) under the direction of Michael Nicholas. An exultant dithyramb, Leighton’s dance-like anthem—full of his characteristic syncopated rhythms, acerbic harmony of superimposed fourth and fifth intervals, and pungent Lydian inflections (here anchored to C)—is tripartite in design with a more restrained, central portion (‘The Church with psalms must shout’) which expands vocally into five parts.

A graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied composition with Robin Holloway, Jonathan Dove composed his setting of verses from the Book of Amos (chapter 5, verse 8) and Psalm 139 (verse 12) in 1995 in response to a commission from the Friends of the Royal Academy of Arts for their annual service at St James’s Piccadilly on 24 May of that year. Pellucidly diatonic in its diaphanous projection of C major, Seek him that maketh the seven stars is made up of two principal sections, impressionistic in their wash of sound and images of the infinite. The first, marked ‘with awe’, is translucently decorated with glistening figurations from the organ, and each accumulation of diatonic clusters is punctuated by a recurring exhortation, ‘Seek him’. A second episode, more animated and metrically varied, breaks the C major mould with divergencies to A major and F sharp major at its climax, but eventually, by way of G minor, the translucence of C major returns to underpin the coming of morning and its victory over the darkness of death. Here, Dove significantly introduces the verse from Psalm 139 (‘Yea, the darkness shineth as the day’) which leads to a restoration of the opening tempo and the affirmation of C major in the celestial coda.

The St Albans triptych—comprising an ‘Introduction with dances’, ‘Lamento’ and ‘Fugue’—by Matthew Martin, Precentor and Director of Music at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, was commissioned as a test piece for the 2019 St Albans International Organ Competition. It was also dedicated to the virtuoso organist Peter Hurford OBE, who founded the competition in 1963 to promote the organ beyond its somewhat stereotypical role as an accompaniment to church services. One can look to the precedent of tripartite organ works concluding with a fugue in J S Bach’s Toccata, Adagio and Fugue, BWV564, but the ‘triptyque’ became a frequent formal resource for composers such as Vierne, Tournemire, Dupré, Demessieux, Toebosch, Julian Raoul Besset and Daniel Roth, and in more recent times for figures such as Francis Pott whose Introduction, Toccata & Fugue was published in 2001. The individual component movements of Martin’s work also suggest an affinity for Jehan Alain’s organ works from the 1930s, with their particular preference for dances, intermezzi and fugues. Although the constituent parts of Martin’s triptych are well delineated in terms of character, there is also a strong sense of larger cogency in which the three ‘scenes’ form a single, cyclically connected structure. At the heart of the ‘Introduction’, which has an element of improvisation, is a demonic dance, rather Holstian in its use of consecutive triads. A secondary dance, which begins in 13/16 time, functions as a contrast, but it is the demonic music that prevails and concludes in C minor. The restrained ‘Intermezzo: Lamento’, of which there is a brief foreshadowing in the ‘Introduction’, is a solemn through-composed essay featuring a matrix of dense contrapuntal entries in five parts. This closes in D minor. The four-voice ‘Fugue’, also couched in D minor, combines diatonic and highly chromatic features within its subject. After the exposition of alto, soprano, tenor and bass (pedal) entries, further entries in F minor and (canonically) in E flat minor lead to a stretto of the fugal subject and its augmentation in the pedals in A minor, as well as a secondary stretto of inverted forms of the subject. These are preparatory to a dominant pedal in which the ‘Lamento’ briefly intrudes as a tonal anchor. Further elements of contrapuntal rhetoric figure in inversion and retrograde forms before a final condensed stretto yields to a return of the triadic demonic dance of the ‘Introduction’, its initial improvisatory flourishes and a conclusive statement of D major at the very end.

Jeremy Dibble © 2025