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Track(s) taken from CDA67557

Westminster Service

composer
'For the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter in Westminster', 1957
author of text
Luke

Westminster Abbey Choir, James O'Donnell (conductor), Robert Quinney (organ)
Recording details: June 2005
Westminster Abbey, London, United Kingdom
Produced by Jeremy Summerly
Engineered by Simon Eadon
Release date: November 2005
Total duration: 8 minutes 24 seconds
 

Other recordings available for download

St John's College Choir Cambridge, Andrew Nethsingha (conductor), George Herbert (organ)

Reviews

‘James O'Donnell proves himself master of two Westminster traditions: the Collegiate Abbey style is as assured as his former 'continental' Cathedral persona. Best are the persuasively-layered Britten Te Deum, and conspicuously bouncy Walton Jubilate. The Tomkins reponses almost purr with effortless control’ (BBC Music Magazine)

‘This is glorious music sung to perfection’ (American Record Guide)

‘I'm so taken with this program that I frankly rebel at the notion of spending one sentence, much less a paragraph, on the topic of alternative recordings’ (Fanfare, USA)

‘The setting's generous acoustics play their own part, bathing the entire recording in a warm, luxuriant glow. Those with even the vaguest interest in choral music will undoubtedly want to add this fine recording to their collection’ (HMV Choice)
Westminster Abbey played an important part in the life of Herbert Howells. He composed Behold, O God, our defender for the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953. Four sets of canticles were premiered in the Abbey—Howells in E (1935; for tenors, basses and organ—to be included in our album Magnificat 4), Howells in D (1941; a largely unison setting for men’s voices and organ), Howells in B minor (1955; for the Church Music Society Jubilee Festival Service at the Abbey) and the present work (1957; for the Collegiate Church of Saint Peter in Westminster). The present work is twenty-four pages long, compared to twenty-eight in the St Paul’s Service, but it feels a lot more compact. I grew to love this particular set of canticles when I was George Guest’s organ scholar; it was one of his favourites. When we recorded the work in January 2022 I had no inkling that I might ever work at the Abbey myself.

Westminster Abbey is full of stories and history; from bar one Howells transports us to a world of secrets, dreams and imagination. The choir almost whispers the first phrase. The music seems to be carried by the wind—floating, ephemeral—and this somehow reflects the awesome height of the building, emphasised by its narrowness. The work opens with alternating D minor and F sharp minor chords, Moving easily and lightly, the oscillating F sharps and F naturals contributing to the enigmatic atmosphere. These chords form the kernel of the work. A cello melody in the second bar generates other material, often in linking passages.

In our first volume I wrote about the sensation of walking east through the organ screen at Gloucester, and how Howells reflects that in his music. There is something analogous at the Abbey when you leave the dark tunnel under the organ screen and the full majesty of the Quire rises up before you, like rounding a significant corner on the Cornish coast path and another twenty miles of cliff coming into view. 'He remembering his mercy' reflects that sense of architectural wonder. With the exception of two settings (in G and E respectively) which combine Magnificat and Gloria into single movements, this is the first of Howells’ Magnificats to end with a harmonic question mark rather than a diatonic concord; the words for ever have particular meaning in this building. The airy, floating canticle begins and ends in a dream-like state; had Mary dreamt her visit from the Angel Gabriel? We are abruptly woken by the Gloria, marked 'Risvegliato' ('reawakening')—we are brought back down to earth with the emphatic organ pedal which launches the trebles’ opening phrase.

Nunc dimittis follows the example of Stanford in B flat by having a long unison passage for tenors and basses. The descending unison immediately before the Gloria recalls the equivalent passage of Stanford in C, though Howells’ version is starker and grittier. As in Collegium Regale the two Glorias are identical. The Gloria restates the Magnificat’s opening material, now forte, eventually arriving at the composer’s beloved F sharp major—a resolution at last.

The RCM Library holds musical sketches entitled Nunc dimittis (St Peter’s), but these in fact ended up as part of the setting dedicated to Salisbury nine years later. Howells proposed the idea of a Westminster Service in 1956. Nine months later he sent the manuscript to Sir William McKie, the Abbey Organist, with a covering letter:

[…] If and only if you find enough to approve […] If I knew exactly what you yourself liked most (in idiom) or the building itself most cared for, I’d have known just what to write. You need not be afraid to turn it down if it seems the sort of thing you don’t like. Then I’ll have another go.

The humility of Howells is striking, and it is surprising that he professes not to know the building well. This may reflect the fact that the Abbey’s acoustic is less easy to categorise and understand than those at, say, King’s, Gloucester or St Paul’s. Yet Howells absolutely captured the spirit of the place. McKie was delighted with the work and it was heard for the first time at an Evensong during the First International Congress of Organists.

This is the eleventh of the twenty settings of the Evening Canticles which Howells wrote over a period of fifty-five years. Howells ‘painting’ the Evening Canticles again and again makes me think of David Hockney portraying the small single-tracked road of Woldgate fifty-two times in his The Arrival of Spring for his Royal Academy Exhibition in 2012. Close to the spot where Howells’s ashes are buried in the Abbey is Hockney’s stained glass window, The Queen’s Window. On a summer evening, light streams in through the window creating an amazing wash of colours on the floor and the statue opposite. There is a similar interaction between Howells’ music and the buildings in which it is heard.

from notes by Andrew Nethsingha © 2023

Other albums featuring this work

Magnificat, Vol. 3
Studio Master: SIGCD742Download onlyStudio Master FLAC & ALAC downloads available
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