TWO years ago this month, Andrew Nethsingha was appointed Organist and Master of the Choristers at Westminster Abbey, a post that he took up in January 2023, just a few months before the Coronation.
He had spent the previous 15 years as director of music of St John’s College, Cambridge, during which he recorded more than 25 albums with the choir. The final one — Magnificat 4 — has just been released. A collection of contrasting settings of the evening canticles, it explores the breadth of imagination with which different composers have approached the familiar texts. It is the last in a series of award-winning recordings made in partnership with Signum Records.
How does he choose what to include in an album? “Overall, we’ve had something like 32 settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in the four volumes; some very well-known, iconic settings by Stanford and other people, and a number of more esoteric ones; and each volume has included some music that’s been written specifically for St John’s,” he says.
The volumes tend to have mini themes: in this instance, a central group of three contrasting works, all written for neighbouring King’s College. “I suppose it’s a bit like hanging paintings in an art gallery. You think that, if you put this one next to that one, it gives a different sort of insight,” he says.
There are two overall aims, “one being just to think of these extraordinary words of the canticles that we sing or say every day and have done for hundreds and hundreds of years — the different way composers come to the music, some inspired particularly by the architecture of the building, some by the circumstances of the composition”.
Each setting looks at the words through a different lens, he says. Stanford in G, for example, is “a very unruffled kind of piece, very serene and easy. It’s such a contrast with, say, the Tippett setting, which was on the first volume, which is the opposite of comfortable, and emphasises not the young, slightly naïve Mary, but the huge revolutionary that Jesus was going to become, turning everything upside down.”
And he is also on a mission to dispel any sense that church music is a poor relation of more mainstream classical music. “A lot of it is music of the very highest value as well. That’s been a bit of a mission of mine.”
These days, of course, most people listen to recordings digitally rather than from a CD. “There’s this strange thing for classical musicians, that we’re making recordings and sometimes they exist only in a kind of virtual format,” he says. “I like being able to have something concrete. It’s bit like an author wanting to have a physical book and be able to put it on the shelf rather than just on a Kindle. I like the physicality of recordings.”
Digital-only buyers miss out, too, on the cover image, and the informative sleeve notes. “It’s about having a lot of research in it, and photographs of manuscripts and historical things, and also some rather eminent theologians writing about the canticles,” he says. (Rowan Williams, Mark Oakley, Lucy Winkett, and Andrew Hammond have each written reflections for this series.)
“They all bring their different theological insights, and the composers bring theirs. It’s about making you look at these things afresh.”
Every daily evensong should also seem “new and fresh and special”, he believes, and enable the congregation “to look and listen with new eyes and ears”.
BEFORE St John’s, he held appointments at Gloucester Cathedral, Wells, and Truro. How does he keep things fresh after 30 years?
“I think I’m lucky to be a person who has a lot of ideas,” he says. “Also, I’m always striving to do things a bit better. After any evensong, wherever I’ve worked, I could tell you 50 things that could have been a bit better.”
Magnificat 4 — like the others in the series — includes two commissions written specifically for St John’s: one by Dame Judith Weir, Master of the King’s Music, and another by Jonathan Dove. “The first volume had the very famous piece that Tippett wrote for St John’s, for the 450th anniversary of the college, and this last volume has a piece that Judith Weir wrote for the 500th anniversary of the college [in 2011],” he says.
“I remember when I asked her whether she might consider writing something she said she was not quite sure. She said, in her characteristically modest way, that she didn’t feel so confident about writing church music.” The mention of taking the baton from Tippett was enough to persuade her — but the result was not quite what Mr Nethsingha was expecting.
“I talked to her about it at a Prom concert that we were giving in the Albert Hall, where we were singing an amazing anthem, “Ascending into Heaven”, with a very extrovert organ part, and I kind of imagined we might get something a bit like that. But, in fact, what she wrote was something much more austere and simple.”
It took him a little while to get to the heart of the music. “I’m not sure if I did, when we first performed it. And then we had a few years when I didn’t perform it, and I heard one or two other people performing the piece, and realised all sorts of qualities in it that I hadn’t noticed myself the first time. It’s amazingly well crafted. It’s got some slightly quirky things, in terms of rhythm. I think one of the things that is, to my mind, innovative about her music is her use of dynamics and extraordinary sensitivity to the text. It really repays lots and lots of work and study and rehearsal.”
James BeddoeAndrew Nethsingha at St John’s College, Cambridge
The Jonathan Dove piece was a commission in memory of the former Master Sir Christopher Dobson, who died in 2019. “Chris was a very joyful man, and this is a joyful piece in tribute to him,” Mr Nethsingha says.
A personal favourite that he mentions in the sleeve notes is Murrill in E, a setting that was recorded by his late father, Lucian, also an organist and director of music. That recording — on the album Sing Joyfully — was Critics’ Choice in Gramophone magazine in 1965.
“He was very proud of the wonderful review that he got in Gramophone 59 years ago, and it’s a piece I greatly love,” Mr Nethsingha says. It is also a setting that really works within the liturgy. “I won’t name names, but some very famous British composers don’t necessarily write pieces which are really well suited to their purpose as part of the liturgy. They write things that are so huge and difficult and long that they unbalance the liturgy, and you need five hours to rehearse them, instead of 25 minutes; so they don’t take root in the in the repertoire.”
He flags up a piece on the album by a young composer, Anna Semple, which includes a violin part, performed by her brother, a bass in the choir. “Working in a university, it was stimulating to be surrounded by these incredibly talented young students,” he says. “In terms of putting a different complexion on a well-known text, having that solo violin and having those aleatoric textures is rather different from most settings; so I really enjoyed preparing that.”
Another piece that he draws attention to is by Piers Connor Kennedy, a former bass in the choir. “There are five contemporary pieces on the disc, and three of them are written by singers who understand liturgical choral music from the inside, as it were. I think there’s a kind of timelessness about Piers’s piece, which was written for Worcester Cathedral, and embodies the architecture of a great cathedral in its sound.
“There’s a sense of him understanding the kind of ritualistic nature of repeating a certain text. It’s not trying to draw attention to itself and not trying to show you how clever it is, but it goes to the heart of the thing and encourages a meditative mind and sort of numinosity.”
TWO months after the announcement of Mr Nethsingha’s appointment to the Abbey, the late Queen died, which meant that, even before he had moved to London, he was drawn into preparations for the Coronation. The King, Buckingham Palace said at the time, had been fully and personally involved in planning the programme of music (News, 19 April 2023), but Mr Nethsingha was the person who had to deliver it.
The most urgent task was the commissioning of the 12 new pieces of music, he says. There was a “a lot of consultation”, but all the decisions were the King’s. “I had an audience with the King in Windsor, the week before Christmas [2022], where we finalised most of it.”
The result was widely regarded as a triumph. Writing in The Times, Richard Morrison, the paper’s classical-music critic, praised “the glorious sound produced under Andrew Nethsingha’s nerveless direction” of the assembled choirs.
How did it feel? “I think I probably was fairly nerveless when it came to the thing,” he says. “But it was very, very nerve-racking in the months leading up to it. It’s always nerve-racking, commissioning pieces and not quite knowing what you’re going to get, and wondering whether it’s going to be impossibly difficult.”
It was “a huge feat of organisation” to be involved with, he says, while paying tribute to his “amazing colleagues” at the Abbey and elsewhere. “But I did insist that we have lots and lots of rehearsal, because we had five different choirs: Westminster Abbey, the Chapel Royal, Truro Cathedral, the Methodist College in Belfast, and members of the Monteverdi Choir.” The orchestra — “miles away” — added another complication.
The amount of rehearsal that he scheduled took some people by surprise, but he was insistent. He had read a file of letters between Sir William Mackie — director of music between 1941 and 1963, and responsible for the music at both the wedding and the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II — and the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, and also the autobiography of Sir Frederick Bridge, who was responsible for the music at the coronation of Edward VII, in 1902.
Benjamin Ealovega/Westminster AbbeyAndrew Nethsingha in rehearsal for the Coronation
“Bridge needed to organise the first coronation that there had been for 64 years, because Queen Victoria had reigned for so long, and there were not very many notes from 1838. I at least had more notes from 1953, but it was an even longer period back,” he says. He read that Bridge had insisted on very precise timings for the pieces of music commissioned, and Mackie had been adamant that no singers could miss a single rehearsal beforehand. “So, 120-something years later, I did the exact same thing for these composers and the singers, because I had a precedent for a hard-and-fast rule.”
This was particularly important for the children taking part. “I said to the adults, this is a phenomenal privilege to conduct you, and I’m well aware that, if it was just you singing in the service, we could do a broadcast in front of however many hundreds of millions tomorrow, and it would all be great. But, actually, there are going to be young trebles and sopranos singing as well, who aren’t so used to doing things on the telly, and it’s potentially a pretty scary business for them. And we need to have lots and lots of time for them to learn from your example, and for you to give them confidence so that, when it comes to the day, there isn’t anything for them to worry about.”
He describes the whole experience as “astonishing”, and appreciates the singularity of the occasion. “I’m not certain, but I think only four Abbey organists have conducted a coronation since Purcell; so it was an extraordinary privilege.”
The Coronation clearly dominated the beginning of his tenure. How are the more routine aspects of his job? “It’s a wonderful place to be, and I’ve been very lucky to be in a succession of wonderful places,” he says. “I suppose, to start with, as in any new job, it’s a question of developing a deep rapport and relationship with my new, wonderful singers. They need to get to know me, and I need to get to know them, and that’s going really well.”
He is, he says, learning a great deal from collaborating with his new singers and organists. “It is a joy to have some of the country’s leading consort and solo singers in my choir at the Abbey. Several also sing with the Tallis Scholars, the Sixteen, the Monteverdi Choir, and so on. It enables me to develop further as a musician, and to explore a lot of repertoire that is new to me.”
And, he says, “it’s about developing a relationship with the building and its sound. I remember how hard I found that when I moved from Gloucester to Cambridge. And then you gradually unlock the secrets of the building. It’s exciting. The Abbey is a uniquely remarkable building, and it has so many different characters, architecturally and acoustically. Depending where you sing, it creates a totally different sound-world for the congregation.”
There have been three big concerts this year: Messiah, the St Matthew Passion, and, most recently, Haydn’s Creation. “To perform Messiah in the building where Handel performed his music so often, and where the choir line up beforehand, in the south transept, just right next to where he’s buried . . . it’s quite extraordinary.” Many of the big choruses in Messiah often have two slow bars towards the end followed by a pause and a final Amen. “And you know he had the Abbey acoustic in mind,” he says.
Haydn’s Creation has similar associations. “It’s a completely astonishing piece, and so full of joy and so well suited to this building. But to think that Haydn didn’t write it until he was in his mid-sixties: he was an enormously prolific composer before that, but he’d never written anything remotely like Creation before, and he was inspired to do that by coming to Westminster Abbey in the early 1790s, and coming to some events, including Messiah, in the Abbey as part of the Handel-commemoration festivals. It makes you think about the links between Handel and Haydn, and the links between the two pieces.
“And [Johann Peter] Salamon, the famous violinist, the man who brought Haydn to London, which resulted in him hearing the Handel — he’s buried in the cloisters. I walk past him every day.”
Other musicians with memorials in the Abbey include Mr Nethsingha’s predecessors Orlando Gibbons and Henry Purcell. It would be easy, I suggest, to be overawed by such surroundings. He smiles. “Looking at organists of Westminster Abbey over the last few hundred years, as far as I know, I’m the oldest person to have been appointed to this role. There’s part of me that feels a bit sad that I’m not younger, because there’s so much I’d like to do here, and I wish I had more time.
“But, on the other hand, I’m very glad of having been able to get several decades of experience elsewhere before coming here, because this is such a huge job with so much responsibility and so much expectation. If I’d tried to start doing this ten or 20 years ago, I would have sunk without trace, whereas, at my grand old age [he is 56], I am managing to keep my head above water.”
Magnificat 4 is published by Signum Records