PRAYERBOOK, an oratorio by the concert pianist, BBC presenter, and Elgar expert David Owen Norris, made quite a splash when first heard in Dorchester Abbey a few springs ago. Now, an inspired performance at St Mary’s, Andover, by weighty musical forces led by the Andover Choral Society, has revealed more fully the depths and attraction of this work.
Prayerbook is dedicated to illuminating, so far as is possible in a musical setting, the wisdom, Aristotelian moderation (“It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England . . . to keep the mean between the two extremes”), and quality and clarity of prose from the Book of Common Prayer.
Mr Norris’s chosen texts range far wider. They glide from the 12th-century Bernard of Morlaix’s evocative hymn “Jerusalem the golden” (translated by J. M. Neale) and “Hail, gladdening light”, the early Greek hymn translated by John Keble, to lines from Tyndale’s Bible and Cranmer, and hymn texts by Isaac Watts and Charles Wesley. (The composer is a Keble, Oxford, man, as is the work’s dedicatee, the Revd John Manifold Courtenay.)
What made the strongest impression previously was a forceful male quartet (AATB) drawn from former scholars of New College and Christ Church, Oxford.
The quartet’s contribution culminates in an astonishing double fugue expounding the Prayer Book injunctions for marriage, reflecting the Church’s insistence on “ample and secure provision” for both “a sound rule of faith . . . [and] a sober standard of feeling”, as Keble put it in The Christian Year (1827).
The male vocal quartet was fractionally less forceful this time. Thanks to this moderation, three things stood out. First of these was the declamation of the baritone cantor, Thomas Guthrie, a singer of interpretative imagination and marked personal presence. Second were two well-tuned contributions from a girls’ choir, the Hampshire County Youth Choir.
Third, and above all, were a “calypso” setting of “Hail, gladdening light”, the first section of the work to be composed, and an angular organ fugue that would tax most performers, but whose demanding double-pedalling held few fears for the assistant organist of Romsey Abbey, David Coram.
The two most thought-provoking passages derived from a more recent source, God, Miracle and Meditations by Dr David Jenkins, former Bishop of Durham. The tune Penlan, setting a hymn that followed the second Jenkins extract (“When I want God to be near, I must not look towards him or he is gone. . .”), was composed by another David Jenkins (1848/9- 1915).
The first of these two extracts, “I have become involved in many arguments”, delivered with beguiling tone, musical insight, and patent affection by Mr Guthrie, and his appealing delivery, as cantor, of the litany and a handful of evening prayers, made this expressive cantata feel remarkably like Compline sung at, say, the Edington Festival. There could be no higher compliment.
This performance of Prayerbook was recorded. Copies can be obtained (as soon as available) from David Owen Norris (info@davidowennorris.com).
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