Once I had a rather dyspeptic acquaintance who regularly wrote into Radio 3 to complain about all “all the modern rubbish” they insisted on playing. By that he meant, music written since March 26, 1827, the day that Beethoven died. Alas he, like Beethoven, has long since moved on to his reward, which includes, we can only hope, a repertoire more to his liking. I thought of him on Friday night because that celestial playlist – again so we hope and perhaps believe – may resemble the programme lavished on us by Ex Cathedra in the Shropshire Music Trust’s final concert of its season.
The occasion celebrated the tercentenary of Dr Charles Burney, inquisitive Musical Historian, Composer, Belov’d Friend-to-the-Bewigg’d-Stars, who was born in Shrewsbury in 1726 and spent his long life chasing music across Europe for which to compend into the first History of Music in the English Language. Here, the repertoire he encountered, admired, and in some cases scrambled to notate, spoke on his behalf three centuries on, with the SMT’s artistic director John Moore, one of Dr Burney’s most avid contemporary champions, reading extracts from the great man’s writing, with beautiful inflections of the wit and direct insights into the musical scene he met on his travels in his Grand Tour.
From Handel’s Zadok to Haydn’s Creation, joyous Bach and a capella Mozart, there was a feast of peerless music-making in the kind of living, breathing choral expertise that makes this group, under the titanic Jeffrey Skidmore, a global phenomenon. More, in fact, than this review of mere pedestrian words can do justice, except to focus on three works that capture some of the adventure, the startling breadth of the night, and its intense depths of spiritual experience. First up, the Hanacpachup cusicuinin, the Andean processional from the Jesuit Codex Calcha, that improbable document of colonial encounter in which Spanish polyphony and indigenous devotion pressed themselves together into something neither tradition could have arrived at alone. Skidmore's singers gave it a quality that was simultaneously archaic and startlingly modern. We swam in its timelessness.
My second highlight was Charpentier's Transfige, dulcissime Jesu and, as the man said, we were transfixed. The antiphonal passages bloomed against St Chad’s curved walls with almost painful richness, the soprano sailed their lines upward as though the music itself were attempting an ascent. The harmonic language, with its characteristically Charpenterian appetite for dissonance resolved at the last possible moment, kept the ear in a state of sustained, pleasurable anxiety. It is music that understands suffering as a form of attention. Ex Cathedra rendered it with exactly that quality of focused grief.
Finally the Allegri Miserere. A piece which perhaps lumbers under the weight of its own mythology and repeated flailings on Classic FM. But here, in its liveness, so zestily unpeeled, we had a moment to reflect it was Burney, who obtained from Rome one of the earliest reliable copies of this most jealously guarded of sacred secrets, part of his forensic effort to understand why the piece’s effect was so much greater than its architecture might suggest. Skidmore’s singers similarly delivered a masterclass in deceptive simplicities, restoring the work to the liturgical function its strophic structure implies with unhurried, plaintive sensibility. The famous top C, when it came, twice, was not a stunt but a destination: the soprano floated it in a silence so complete that one could hear the faintest sigh of the rotunda itself resettling around the note. With his unerring ear for a hit, Burney noted at the time this was a piece that would “ravish the soul of every era.” And so we were. Irrefutably and utterly ravished as Shrewsbury, for an evening, remembered one of its own.
James Fraser-Andrews
