IN ITS 40-year history, the St Albans International Organ Festival has established itself as one of the highlights of the summer calendar, offering the discerning music lover as much as the organ anorak a stimulating mixture of concerts, recitals and lectures, in addition to a competition every bit as exciting as the better publicised singing and piano contests in Cardiff and Leeds.
This is in no small measure due to the perseverance of its first artistic director and current president, the abbey’s then Master of the Music, Peter Hurford, whose primary objective was the long-overdue recognition of the organ — perceived by many simply as a holy Muzak machine — as a legitimate concert instrument.
The first festival, in 1963, coincided with the inauguration of the abbey’s splendid new Harrison & Harrison organ, an eclectic beast designed by Ralph Downes and Dr Hurford himself to sound well across the entire organ repertoire. It still sounds well, bright and clear enough for Bach and the Baroque, but rich and colourful enough to serve the French Romantics and moderns, two of whom – Duruflé and Messiaen – featured in this year’s Festival Evensong. In the event, this proved to be a double celebration — not only of the festival’s anniversary but of the indebtedness owed by church music to the putatively godless 20th century.
The service began with a haunting introit, a thoughtful, neo-Renaissance psalm-setting by the late and little-known Cambridge music don Hubert Middleton, sung behind the 14th-century rood screen by the abbey choir under its gifted music director, Andrew Lucas, before they and the clergy emerged from invisibility and proceeded to their places before the nave altar.
Then, after the general confession, came the responses and psalm, the former to Bernard Rose’s classic setting, the latter to an attractive chant by Dr Hurford, who was himself present to read the second lesson.
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Some words from the Office Hymn, Fred Pratt Green’s When in our music God is glorified, which we sang to Stanford’s rousing yet appropriately inconclusive tune “Engelberg”, are well worth quoting, for they summed up the whole thrust of the service, “How often, making music, we have found a new dimension in the world of sound, as worship moved us to a more profound Alleluia.”
That “new dimension in the world of sound” was not long in coming: Sir Michael Tippett’s abrasively interrogative setting of the Evening Canticles, written for the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge, and as challenging now as it was at its premiere in 1962. Curiously prescient of John Robinson’s wake-up call to the Anglican Church, Honest to God, which was published shortly afterwards, this is the humanist’s Mag and Nunc par excellence, and a disorientating contrast to the gorgeously romantic setting by Sir William Harris of John Donne’s perennial favourite, “Bring us, O Lord God, at our last awakening into the house and gate of Heaven”, which preceded the sermon.
Engagingly delivered by a former succentor of St Paul’s Cathedral, the Rev Stephen Waine, this must have warmed the hearts of all those frustrated by the joyless resistance to high culture of many contemporary churches. His anecdotal, often humorous address, based on the enigmatic psalm text “The Lord is my strength and my song”, and mercifully devoid of tortuous theological sophistry, came to a climax with a simple yet profound question and answer — “Why do we sing? Because we can” — just like an acrobat’s somersaults of praise before a high altar. And so to the final hymn, Angel Voices Ever Singing, and the closing voluntary, a stunning rendition of the Offrande and Alleluia Final from Messiaen’s great organ cycle, Livre du Saint Sacrament. Much appreciated by the congregation, who burst into spontaneous and well-deserved applause, this gothic extravaganza is a further striking demonstration of a “new dimension in the world of sound”, once again challenging its listeners to a mature, inclusive faith, strong and confident enough joyfully to embrace, rather than shun, the modern world — towards, indeed, “a more profound Alleluia”.
A five-star guide
SERVICE: Evensong marking the 40th anniversary of the founding of the St Albans International Organ Festival
VENUE: Cathedral and Abbey Church of St Alban, St Albans
PREACHER: The Rev Stephen Waine: an unpretentious defence of musical excellence
MUSIC: Challenging yet nourishing 20th-century classics, impeccably performed by the abbey choir and organist
PRE-SERVICE CARE: Sunday afternoon teas served in the refectory