The Daily Telegraph - Features
In the Abbey, it was all about the music: artistry and conviction reigned
Musically, this was the Coronation that was going to break the mould. The King wanted a more diverse and inclusive ceremony, and the music had to reflect that. Girl choristers would be involved for the first time ever, as well as a gospel choir, a Greek orthodox choir and two distinguished black soloists. And there were to be no fewer than 12 brand new pieces. But when the full list of music was disclosed, it seemed like business as usual. William Byrd, Edward Elgar, Walford Davies, Vaughan Williams, Handel, Parry – all the names familiar from every Coronation since 1902 were there.
So in setting the musical tone of this first coronation of the 21st century, who would win out? Would it be Sir Hubert Parry or Lord Lloyd-Webber, composer of the brand new Coronation anthem Make a Joyful Noise? The answer, you may not be surprised to hear, was Sir Hubert Parry, whose great anthem, I was Glad, performed by the Abbey and Chapel Royal Choirs plus those girl choristers, together with the orchestra, rang out at the very moment when the King and Queen entered the Abbey. It was stupendously performed at a firm pace – it’s all too easy for things to drag in the cavernous acoustic of the Abbey – and the fanfares and acclamations from the boy and girl choristers were startlingly vivid. After the moment of reflectiveness in the middle, the thrilling “turn” of the harmony as the music drives towards its magnificent ending would have melted the heart of the sternest republican.
That was a tough act to follow. For the second place in splendour, Lloyd Webber’s anthem went head-to-head with Handel’s Zadok the Priest, sung at the mystical moment when the King was anointed. Like Handel’s anthem, Lloyd Webber’s made a virtue of simplicity, hammering away at the same little phrase and seizing on the two simplest harmonies in music and making them blaze in trumpets and kettledrums. It was joyous and catchy, in Lloyd Webber’s inimitable way. The instinct for the hit number didn’t desert him, just because he was writing music for a King’s Coronation.
Optimism of a less straightforward kind was what the other commissioned composers were aiming at, and the two new allelujas from film composer Debbie Wiseman hit the nail on the head. They were sweetly intimate and flowing, but though the first was a good vehicle for the church singers, the second seemed constraining for the spectacularly white-suited gospel Ascension Singers. They sang it beautifully, but I couldn’t help wishing they’d sung some real gospel music.
Roxanna Panufnik’s Coronation Sanctus tried something different, a vision of heaven tinged with modernist harmonies and bird-like twitterings which was perhaps over-subtle for the occasion and the venue. The last of the new pieces, Tarik O’Regan’s setting of the Greek prayer the Agnus Dei, was the most successful. It had the reflective note tinged with the diverse musical influences that the King was hoping for, but it was rooted in something simple anyone could register immediately – a melodic phrase with a modal tinge that could have been Arab or eastern European.
Star operatic bass-baritone
Bryn Terfel gave a heartfelt performance of Paul Mealor’s brand new rhapsodic Welshlanguage setting of the Kyrie Eleison, but even more affecting was baritone Roderick Williams in Walford Davies’s Confortare: Be Strong. The lovely dying-away ending with just one trumpet note left hanging was so affecting it actually rivalled the noise and splendour of I was Glad as the ceremony’s great musical moment.
There were many other wonderful things: the purity and clarity of the choirs in William Byrd’s anthem Prevent Us, O Lord, the sharp rhythms and dramatic call-and-response of the brass in Sir William Walton’s Coronation Te Deum. And let’s not forget the pre-concert music. This included Iain Harrington’s new organ piece Voices of the World, the mild jazziness of which seeming really daring amid the sea of Handel and
Music
The Coronation
Westminster Abbey
Behind the glorious harmonies and splendour one could feel the power of tradition itself
Bach, and Pretty Yende’s creamy soprano voice in Handel’s Oh, had I Jubal’s Lyre, floating seraphically over the heads of all the dignitaries.
The sublime artistry and fervent conviction on display from everyone, from the choirboys and girls and orchestral musicians right up to the star soloists, was hugely moving. But behind the glorious harmonies and eartingling splendour one could feel, like a deep ground-bass, the power of the tradition itself. The echoes of previous coronations were innumerable, but the affinities with 20th-century coronations were the strongest.
Some things, such as the prayer Confortare: Be Strong, the exquisite Amen by the 17th-century composer Orlando Gibbons, and of course Parry’s I was Glad have been heard in every coronation since 1902. The only significant change in tone in the King’s Coronation has been the banishing of that earnest Victorian piety represented by composers such as SS Wesley and CV Stanford.
Strongest of all were the affinities with the coronation of the late Queen in 1953, signalled most obviously by the inclusion of Dyson’s exquisite Confortare and the resplendent Te Deum composed especially for the occasion. At that far-off time Britain was enjoying a post-war musical renaissance. Benjamin Britten and Sir Michael Tippett (composer of a suite to celebrate the birth of the King in 1948) were in the ascendant, Glyndebourne and the Edinburgh Festival were getting into their stride. But it has to be said it was a somewhat insular renaissance, cut off from exciting European trends in composition.
How different the classical musical landscape of the UK is now, open to influences from everywhere, and diverse as never before. Who could have imagined in 1953 that at the next coronation the congregation would hear a gospel choir?
We must thank the King for the diversity of his choices, and for drawing the country’s attention to both the glories of the classical music tradition, and the extraordinary performing and composing talent we have in this country.
There are influential voices who would like to deny our classical music tradition to the next generation, by declaring it elitist and irrelevant. The fact that it was front and centre of the Coronation, inexpressibly stirring and moving to the millions who heard it (whatever their politics), proved the naysayers have got it wrong.