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Durham Cathedral Choir can trace its history back to the earliest time of the Cathedral’s foundation. Originally it was the “monks in quire” who sang the monastery services; we know that for at least 600 years singing boys or Choristers have been educated in the building’s precincts, though. At the Dissolution , the cathedral became a secular foundation, and the place of the monks in quire was taken by Lay (i.e. Non-ordained) Clerks, employed by the dean and canons to sing the daily services. In the 1960s, the Lay Clerks were joined by Choral Scholars (student members of Durham University), and the choir currently consists of twenty Choristers and probationer-choristers, seven Choral Scholars and five Lay Clerks, as well as three Organists.

The Choristers all attend the Chorister School, a preparatory and pre-preparatory school in the Cathedral precincts which numbers just over 200 pupils, and which maintains the special atmosphere which membership of the cathedral community gives to it. They take a full part in the life of the school, not only in music but also in drama and in sports. All of them learn the piano, and most learn a second instru-ment, too. The Choral Scholars are full-time students of the University, reading for degrees in a variety of subjects.. The Lay Clerks pursue careers such as music teach-ing or postgraduate study.

The choir’s function is to maintain the daily choral tradition of the cathedral’s wor-ship. It has done this with only two short breaks (at the Reformation and at the Commonwealth) since the cathedral’s earliest times. It sings eight services a week - Evensong daily except Monday, and Matins and Holy Communion in addition on Sundays. It also sings at special services and concerts, and it has toured on several occasions - to Holland in 1988, the USA in 1994, Denmark in 1996, Norway in 1998, and Lübeck in 2000, where it took part in the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. In December 2000 it visited Brazil for a high-profile tour under the auspices of the British Council and the Cultura Inglesa; in July 2005 it appeared in the International Organ Festival at St Alban’s Abbey. It broadcast Evensong, with Durham Cathedral Consort of Singers, accompanied by the BBC Philharmonic, in 2002 and again in 2007. The choir’s repertoire ranges from mediaeval music through the Golden Age of Tudor English music to the present day; in any week congregation can hear it singing music from several different centuries, much of it composed for precisely this purpose and these forces. It has premiered pieces from such widely differing composers as John Tavener and Wilfred Josephs; it can be heard not only on several recordings of its own but also with Stan Tracey and his Orchestra in a CD of music from Duke Elling-ton’s Sacred Concerts, and on one track of Tina Turner’s album Wildest dreams! But these activities, welcome and valuable though they are, are subservient to its chief work, which is to articulate in music the daily worship of the cathedral - a worshipp-ing community which seeks to be a centre of worship ad mission for the city, the diocese, the country and the world.

© James Lancelot, 2007

 

Edward Bairstow: Blessed City, heavn’ly Salem

The name of Edward Bairstow is inextricably linked with that of York Minster, where he was Organist for many years. Organist, choir trainer, teacher, composer and indeed non-resident Professor of Music at Durham University - his influence extended far and wide. Blessed city is perhaps the most famous and well-loved of his com-positions; the ancient plainsong theme Urbs beata is recreated in true Edwardian style, with virtuoso organ accompaniment.

Thomas Weelkes: Voluntary

Weelkes was one of the more colourful characters to have worked in cathedral music. Although he was frequently in trouble of one sort or another with his employers at Chichester Cathedral, where he was concurrently Informator choristarum (Master of the Choristers), Organist, and a Lay Clerk, the chapter never quite managed to dis-miss him from their service. The principal reason for heir indulgence may well have been that Weelkes was one of the most brilliant and inventive composers of his period, with a fine ear for sonority and expressive musical line, as this organ minia-ture demonstrates.

Richard Farrant: Call to remembrance, O Lord

Richard Farrant, whose career took him to St George’s Chapel, Windsor and the Chapel Royal, was one of a number of contemporary church composers bearing this surname. Call to remembrance, written in accordance with the new edicts that church music be in English and with (for the most part) one note to a syllable, combines simplicity with beauty. It has deservedly stayed in the cathedral repertoire through the last four centuries.

Benjamin Cosyn: Voluntary

Cosyn was a native of Shropshire, and is believed to have studied at least briefly with John Bull at Hereford Cathedral, whilst serving himself as organist at the church of St Laurence in Ludlow. In 1622 he moved to London, and became organist firstly at Dulwich College, and then at the Charterhouse, before being granted in 1643 a small pension by Parliament on account of his ‘poverty, ould age and misperfeccons of body’. His contributions to the keyboard repertoire are found in two collections which he edited, and amount to around fifty pieces. This brief voluntary shows his fine command of counterpoint, displaying lyricism and lively interplay between the three parts.

William Byrd: Sing joyfully unto God our strength

Another staple of the the cathedral repertoire, Sing joyfully demonstrates in excelsis Byrd’s mastery of Tudor style and his ability to compose accessible settings of newly-translated texts. The choir is deployed both polyphonically and homophonically; the text is where possible set illustratively (Blow the trumpet in the new moon). The existence of an organ part in Durham library makes it clear that this piece - like many of its contemporaries - was at least sometimes sung accompanied.

Orlando Gibbons: A Fancy in C fa ut

Orlando Gibbons was the youngest of the great Tudor composers, albeit that his life ended tragically early (Tomkins was to outlive him by thirty-one years). Described by a contemporary as ‘the finest finger of his age’, on account of his great agility as a keyboard player, his organ works display a sense of joie de vivre which is quite un-matched in the period, and are frequently characterised by lively cross-rhythms and syncopations, as can be heard here.

Orlando Gibbons: Almighty and everlasting God

Gibbons’ technical mastery is seen here very much at the service of the expressive effect of the texts; he wears his learning lightly. One of relatively few settings of a Collect from the 1549 Prayer Book, this piece too has enjoyed enduring popularity.

William Harris: Bring us, O Lord God

William Harris was one of Farrant’s successors at St George’s Chapel, Windsor some four hundred years later. A fine choir trainer, he was also a prolific composer; his most enduring works, though, are the two D-flat-major double-choir settings of great English texts from the 16th and 17th centuries - Spenser’s poem Faire is the heav’n and Donne’s prayer Bring us, O Lord God. Many years separate these settings; Faire dates from 1925, Bring us, O Lord God from 1959; both speak with the same voice, and both demonstrate complete assurance in harmonic structure, vocal colour and emotional effect.

Patrick Hadley: My beloved spake

Professor of Music at Cambridge and Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cam-bridge, where he directed the music, Patrick Hadley is rembered as a loveable eccentric. But he was a man of great cholarship (and in particular a champion of Delius) and the composer of an inspired, iof relatively slight, oeuvre. My beloved spake (which incidentally boasts an idiomatic piano accompaniment as an alternative to the organ part) has rapidly become a firm favourite, and is clearly set to remain so.

Charles Villiers Stanford: Beati quorum via integra est

Charles Villiers Stanford: Justorum animae in manu Dei sunt

Charles Villiers Stanford: Coelos ascendit hodie

The publications of Stanford’s Three Latin Motets (Opus 38) in 1905 was an epoch-making moment; not since Samuel Wesley (father of Samuel Sebastian) had an English composer set Latin texts with such style and quality. Stanford wrote the motets late in the nineteenth century for Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Organist (he was also one of Hadley’s predecessors as Professor of Music at Cam-bridge). Each of the three paints a musical picture whose impact is accessible and immediate. Immediate and galvanising, too, was the effect these pieces had on the standard of composition of English church music; it is impossible to overestimate their significance in the history of English cathedral music.

Benjamin Britten: Festival Te Deum

For all his eminence, as a composer and his fondness for choral writing, Britten was reticent about setting music for the morning and evening Offices. There are no evening canticles, but the Festival Te Deum is one of two well-known settings of this ancient hymn. Like Blessed city, composed by Bairstow for two Yorkshire mill-town parish churches, this work was written for a parish occasion - the centenary of St Mark’s, Swindon, a church owing its origin to Swindon’s developments as a railway town. Britten rises superbly to the challenge of imposing a coherent musical structure on this somewhat awkward text; in the outer sections, regular organ chords support senza misura choir lines,, whereas in the central section choir and organ are pitched against each other in passages of great rhythmic vitality.

Richard Lloyd: O Lord, give thy Holy Spirit

This text has long been synonymous with Tallis’ beautiful anthem of the same name; it is strange that it seems to have had to wait four hundred years to find another composer. Beginning in the same key as Tallis but following his own unique creative skill and inspiration, Richard Lloyd wrote this piece in response to a commission from the gentlemen of Durham Cathedral Choir to mark James Lancelot’s 50th birthday in 2002. It receives here its first recorded performance.

Charles Villiers Stanford: Fo lo, I raise up

This colourful text is set to music by Stanford in energetic, swash-buckling style. Despite a somewhat loose structure and evidence of some haste in its composition, the piece’s obvious charisma has made it a favourite with many choirs (not all: it is not found in the music-lists of every establishments!). It dates from 1914 (though it remained unpublished until 1939), and it requires an agile accompanist.

Charles Hubert Hastings Parry: I was glad when they said unto me

Parry’s setting of these verses from Psalm 122, composed for the coronation of King Edward VII in 1901, is probably the finest ceremonial choral work of is era - this despite the fact that it originally opened with a surprisingly low-key introduction. The iconic opening which is so familiar was substituted in time for the coronation of King George V; the piece was sung also at the coronations of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth II. In its full form it includes symphonic orchestral accompaniment (with enormous brass forces) and also the traditional vivats  - the Latin greeting sung initially (by ancient right) by the King’s Scholars of Westminster School and then by the full choir. Shorn of these accoutrements, though, it is still a greatly-loved fav-ourite of choirs and congregations, its closing top B flats bringing joy to the trebles, fond memories to the choir men, and tears to the eyes of proud mothers in the congregation....

Kenneth Leighton: Let all the world in every corner sing

Kenneth Leighton was Professor of Music at Edinburgh until cruelly early death. He was in addition a prolific composer who has considerably enriched the cathedral repertoire. His music is sometimes, and too easily, dismissed as rhythmically and melodically formulaic. It is true that syncopated, catchy rhythms are often present, and indeed this work bears that hallmark; but - quite apart from the joie de vivre which enhances Herbert’s text son wonderfully here - Leighton’s command of struct-ure (achieved for example by harmonic progression, by development and recapitula-tion, and by control of tessitura) is extraordinarily sure. Like many another composer represented on this disc, he started life as a cathedral Chorister (in his case Wake-field), drew on the music he absorbed in boyhood, and in later life left his own mark on the repertoire. Such has been the story of English cathedral music in the last five hundred years and more; long may it remain so.

© James Lancelot (choral music) and Keith Wright (organ solos)