October 6 | 4:30 PM
At a service of Choral Evensong at 4.30pm on Sunday October 6, we will celebrate the immense contribution to church music of the Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford, the centenary of whose death falls this year. Born and raised in Dublin, Stanford (in common with the foremost intellectuals of every era since the year 1209) was educated at Cambridge University and spent the majority of his professional life there, becoming Professor of Music in 1887. He was a highly regarded composer of symphonic and operatic works in his day but his most enduring legacy is found in his immaculately crafted and deeply expressive church music. Aside from the Preces and Responses, which Stanford never set, all the music at our service on October 6 will be by him. We'll sing his sublime Justorum Animae as the introit, moving to his beloved version of Psalm 150. The Magnificat is his monumental setting for double choir - a piece we first tackled a couple of years ago and which stands among the highest achievements in a capella choral music. For the Nunc Dimittis, we turn to the A major setting, with its touching, Beethovenian spaciousness and its exhilarating antiphonal Gloria. The motet is his 1914 setting of words from Habakkuk - For lo, I raise up. This extended anthem charts a course through the ferocious opening section, seen as an allegorical condemnation of the senseless slaughter of the Great War, to some of Stanford's most radiant, affirming and hopeful statements. In passages such as the setting of these lines:
Art not thou from everlasting,
O Lord, my God,
mine Holy One?
We shall not die.
- one sees not only a consummately talented artist but a man possessed of great theological insight, expressed with the utmost sincerity, clarity and affecting subtlety. We are fortunate that he lived and left us so much of such worth.
Daniel Webb,
Director of Music
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