When it comes to assembling musical medleys, Leeds Festival Chorus has plenty of excellent material in its repertoire to choose from. Concerts can be designed to be suitable for most venues – St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, for example, where it sang to much acclaim a few years ago.
It was a real pleasure for the Chorus to put together the programme for Gloria at Ripon Cathedral, because it has performed there many times before along with the York Guildhall Orchestra in what amounts to a continuing love affair.
Naturally, there will be something to please most people, from the fresh and new to the well-established. Take the Gloria by Francis Poulenc, for example. He was a twentieth century French composer of modern religious music who became famous for his strikingly direct style, full of contrasts: in this one piece, there are bold statements, dramatic rhythms and divinely lyrical sections.
The prolific Scots composer James MacMillan provides a recent work, O radiant dawn, which harks back to the clarity of the Renaissance, and Johann Sebastian Bach’s Jesu, joy of man’s desiring, dating from the early eighteenth century, is probably well-known by a majority in the audience.
Thomas Tallis’s hymn O nata lux was composed for the Feast of the Transfiguration in the sixteenth century to words which were already at least five hundred years old, and modern American composer Morten Lauridsen took a similarly ancient text for his O magnum mysterium.
The waltz and polonaise from Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is a lyrical masterpiece in the middle of the sacred mix, and of course, the Chorus will be singing Zadok the Priest. Inevitably, someone asks who he was and what is his link with the coronations of kings and queens.
The answer is that he was the priest who anointed King Solomon in Ancient Israel. The biblical words were used at the coronation of King Edgar in the year 973 and became part of a tradition. George Frideric Händel set them to music for the coronation of fellow German George II in 1727.