Composer: Ralph Vaughan Williams
Performer: Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge
Conductor: Andrew Nethsingha
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Signum
Catalogue: SIGCD541
Release: 2018
Size: 1.05 GB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Mass in G Minor
01. Kyrie
02. Gloria in excelsis
03. Credo
04. Sanctus – Osanna I – Benedictus – Osanna II
05. Agnus Dei
06. Te Deum in G Major
07. O vos omnes
5 Mystical Songs
08. V. Antiphon
3 Preludes on Welsh Hill Tunes
09. II. Rhosymedre
10. O Taste and See
11. Prayer to the Father of Heaven
12. O, Clap Your Hands
13. Lord, Thou Hast Been our Refuge
Andrew Nethsingha and The Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge mark the centenary of the 1918 Armistice with a new recording of choral works by Ralph Vaughan Williams. Many of the works were composed in the years immediately following the event, including O clap your hands, Lord, thou hast been our refuge and the Mass in G minor which leads the programme. Vaughan Williams turned his attention to liturgical music following his service as a wagon orderly during the Great War. Ursula Vaughan Williams, his second wife and biographer, wrote that such work ‘gave Ralph vivid awareness of how men died’. It is perhaps unsurprising that in many of the texts to which he turned after the 1918 Armistice, the fragility and weakness of humanity becomes a recurrent theme. Despite being described as a ‘confirmed atheist’ by the philosopher Bertrand Russell, his heightened exploration of Christian texts, symbols, and images after the War might rather be understood both as an attempt to grapple anew with what might lie, as he put it, ‘beyond sense and knowledge’, and to search for consolation in religious and other inherited traditions amid a world irrevocably changed.The fifth release in their series with Signum, the Choir of St John’s have received glowing praise for their previous releases, culminating in the choral prize at the 2017 BBC Music Magazine Awards for their debut release of works by Jonathan Harvey (Deo SIGCD456).
Ralph Vaughan Williams wasn’t the only great artist to have served as an ambulance man on the front lines during the First World War: Ravel, Roussel, Cocteau, Gertrude Stein, Hemingway, Jerome K. Jerome, Somerset Maugham and many others volunteered for this sinister role. It left Vaughan Williams with painful memories, and contributed more than a little towards his term to more spiritual music, although he remained a firm and unbending atheist for the rest of his life, as Bertrand Russell recalled, to whom Williams said around 1920: “There is no reason why an atheist could not write a good Mass” And in fact, this Mass of 1921, for double a capella choir and soloists, is full of splendour, especially when given by the Choir of St John’s College Cambridge, led by their director Andrew Nethsingha. The ensemble complements the programme with a Te Deum from 1928 for choir and organ or orchestra (an organ is used here), one of Vaughan Williams’s works in which tonality is deliberately muted in favour of a very personal form of modality in the old style – but which is also very modern. In this same harmonic spirit O vos omnes of 1922 is an immensely beautiful response for Holy Week, impalpable and unreal, in the same harmonic vein as the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. The album closes with handful of isolated choral pieces, including the famous and joyful Clap Your Hands from the 1920s.