Cover image: Jubilate – 500 Years of Cathedral Music via Decca.
As an international debate continues to rage as to whether teaching children music notation is elitist, this newly released CD featuring recordings made in St Paul’s Cathedral London by its famous choir and invited choristers from 50 cathedrals across the United Kingdom directed by Andrew Carwood, presents a good argument for the benefits of providing children a comprehensive music education. The recording is entitled Jubilate however, there is the shadow of an ulterior motive behind it. The CD is unashamedly released to support the ‘Diamond Fund’ that supports choristers in need across Britain. Why is such a fund necessary you may ask. Surely the English choral tradition is well established and has flourished for centuries supported by healthy ongoing endowments? Not so. With shrinking congregations and rising costs, cathedral choirs find themselves in an apparently difficult place, being seen by cathedral chapters as important yet not indispensable.
I was impressed here by the extraordinarily fine and disciplined singing of St Paul’s Cathedral’s Choir still representing the English choral tradition at it best. Wren’s great cathedral has always demanded a larger than normal choir to sound within its vast spaces; composers such as Herbert Howells have written works specifically for its particular acoustic. It is concerning that in other British cathedrals this great and ancient tradition is under threat. The printed liner notes contain an earnest message from British comedian and singer Alexander Armstrong convincingly arguing for the need to sustain such a tradition: “The most obvious benefit of being a chorister is the total submersion in music. As a young singer, you have the opportunity to gain a complete musical education by a process of osmosis. When you come to hang up your cassock for the final time at the age of 13 you will – without even having realised it was happening, because you were just having a lovely time singing – have personal experience of every age and fashion of music from the ancient fauxbourdons of plainchant, to the exciting knotty textures of anthems so contemporary that the composers themselves might very well have conducted you”.
The CD is a collection of anthems, some famous, such as the opening Zadok the Priest by Handel and Parry’s I Was Glad. Other Anglican favourites are expertly performed by choir and organist (Mendelssohn’s Hear My Prayer, Ireland’s Greater Love Hath No Man, Vaughan Williams’s O Taste and See) before things decidedly turn South. Those with a sweet tooth will not be disappointed: an offering by Howard Goodall is frosted with no less than three items by John Rutter.
Rating: 4 stars out of 5
Jubilate – 500 Years of Cathedral Music
St Paul’s Cathedral Choir
With the Cathedral Choristers of Britain
Aled Jones, tenor
Andrew Carwood, director
Decca 455 050-2
