PHILIP MOORE was still the organist of York Minster when I
encountered a double cassette of his music a decade ago. It
included more than two hours of choral music, and some organ music;
and it struck me that every single piece - fresh, thoughtfully
finessed, and frequently exploratory - was the work of a serious
composer.
Now that Moore has handed over York's gaping acoustic and famous
Tuba Mirabilis to Robert Sharpe, this year's London Festival of
Contemporary Church Music, directed by Christopher Batchelor, has
launched events with a striking, often ravishing 70th-birthday
tribute devoted to Moore's choral output.
Parts of Moore's extensive œuvre were sung at St
Pancras Church, the festival's heart, with polish and tangible
affection by the - here - eight-voice chamber choir Vox Turturis,
under its music director Andrew Gant, lecturer in music at Oxford
and choirmaster-composer at the Chapels Royal, St James's
Palace.
What emerged were, in the main, scintillating performances.
Apart from the odd preponderant voice early on - a momentarily
over-enthusiastic tenor or soprano rasp - the balances evolved as
first-rate; phrasing, attack, and shaping blossomed, nursed by
Gant's elegant, expressive, helpful, and, above all, insightful
conducting: a little distrait and like his old St John's,
Cambridge, mentor, George Guest; yet underneath pinpointed and
needle-sharp.
It seems idle to dub Moore's work "post-" Howells, or Finzi, or
Britten, or as "sounding here and there like Arvo Pärt" (it does
and it doesn't). Rather, Moore deploys a broad range of approaches
tackling liturgical, sacred, or secular music (for the curious,
there is even a concerto), and yet what feels like one internally
reconciled, consistent personal manner.
With its astute polyphony, alluring parallelings, and canny
angularity poached from the emotive impact of (say) diminished
fifths, Moore's music is often unmistakably his. You can hear this
distinction, vitality, and refinement on two discs, including both
organ and choral music, available from the mixed-voice Vasari
Singers (Guild GMCD 7129) and more recently the Exon Singers (Regis
REGCD 315), polished by Matthew Owens of Wells Cathedral.
Such quality characterised Moore's two great
composer-predecessors (three, if you include Tertius Noble), Edward
Bairstow and the now nonagenarian Dr Francis Jackson. Yet Moore's
eloquence, and originality, stands up easily alongside theirs, and
periodically eclipses both.
Eminent cathedral musicians are perhaps
fewer than they once were. Herbert Brewer, Herbert Sumsion, and
John Sanders at Gloucester stand out - Dr James MacMillan runs a
church choir. But other modern composers of English church music -
William Mathias, Peter Maxwell Davies, Gabriel Jackson - were or
are by no means typical organ-loft composers.
This is why Moore, apprentice to the
great Allan Wicks at Canterbury and Barry Rose's successor at
Guildford, has some pre-eminence in the field. Here, we heard music
for not just York, but the Edington Festival, and the Royal Maundy
at Manchester Cathedral. Just as Bairstow penned the anthem "Let
All Mortal Flesh Keep Silent" (we heard two admirable young Vox
Turturis basses in it here) not for York, but for his then fiefdom,
(the former) Leeds Parish Church.
Moore's gripping Three Prayers of
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, part-declamatory, with atmospheric, snaky
counterpoint, proved as eloquent and expressive here as Three
Oxford (perhaps Oxfordshire) Songs, with their
wittily skedaddling finale. (Moore's choice of William Shenstone,
1714-63, proves as inspired as Gerald Finzi's garnering of Ralph
Knevet inFarewell to Arms). One sensed the intelligence, the adroit
and imaginative management of texts, and the musical nous with
which Moore devises his always affecting, intermittently quiet,
complex textures.
Moore sets solo work vividly against
ensemble: witness the expressive soprano, then bass, soli welling
up from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's evening invocation (all from
Letters and Papers from Prison, SCM Press, 1971), after a
lovely, serene cantor-like tenor opening. The Manchester piece,
deliberately simpler, felt a bit wet, but there was a taut setting
of Caedmon of Whitby for the consecration of Bishop Robert Ladds;
semitonal effects in Salutatio angelico for a
cappella double choir; strange (Arvo Pärt-like?) pauses,
canonic patterings (at "Ecce ancilla Domini") and the
gorgeous use of alto 1 and 2 for the recapitulation (in "Ave
Maria gratia plena", a text that Peter Maxwell Davies long ago
set with melting purity).
Moore's carol arrangement "Baby, Born
Today", handled by Gant with equal insight and tender inner part
detail, is a perfect gem. By sleight of hand, Moore can make a
negro spiritual virtually morph into the sparest medieval music. In
"I Saw Him Standing" (2004, setting a prayer by the 18th-century
Welsh farmer's wife Anne Griffiths, translated by Lord Williams),
Moore contrives a marvellous arbour of musical patternings, with
all the canniness and colouring of (say) Britten's Rejoice in
the Lamb. Thank heavens this composer is not afraid to repeat
words, so vital to the art. He makes his texts work. It is
one element that gives Moore's music its energy and stature.
We thus find ourselves with a composer
on a par, in this genre at least, with MacMillan and Mathias,
Henryk Górecki, perhaps even Pärt. Making a case for a composer's
work - a bit like offering a BAFTA fellowship - is precisely one of
the things that Batchelor's splendidly inventive and now
indispensable festival - today embracing 24 venues across London
(may Waltham Abbey and Tallis, be next) - is there to achieve. This
concert and tribute proved a hit.