Holy Week with The Bevan Family Consort

Drawn from a pool of over fifty cousins and siblings, the Bevan Family Consort made its impressive recording debut back in 2023 with Vidi Speciosam, a collection of sacred choral music spanning four centuries which was praised in the Sunday Times for the group's 'exquisite subtlety and clarity' and by Gramophone for the 'care, musicality and bags of personality' on display.

Following an equally characterful Christmas album last year, the Bevans returned this month with a programme devoted to Lent and Passiontide, featuring works by composers including Alfonso Ferrabosco, Girolamo Giacobbi, Mel Bonis and family friend Neil Wright. In the run-up to Easter I sat down with lay-clerk David, musicologist and editor Francis, 'carpenter and general handyman' Henry and fintech data analyst Lizzy to discuss their shared memories of Easter, some of the new discoveries on the album, what goes on in the family WhatsApp chat, and why the group's approach to choosing repertoire 'remains as democratic as ever'...

Did your family come together to sing during Holy Week when you were growing up?

Henry: Some of my favourite music happens around Easter. I have a lovely memory of doing every single Holy Week mass in London with my dad, who ran the choir of the Church of Our Most Holy Redeemer in Chelsea - it was all very dramatic, and very formative for us as youngsters. 

Lizzy: My lasting memory of singing at Easter as a child was the really simple polyphony: things like Anerio’s Christus factus est, which we’d do every single year. Dad wouldn’t change the repertoire, so we’d do the same things over and over again!

David: Passiontide is the zenith of the Christian calendar, and there’s so much juicy repertoire: I don’t think I know a single choral singer who would say hand-on-heart that they prefer Christmas to Easter on a musical level!

Do you all get involved in selecting repertoire for your recordings, or is that a unilateral decision?

Francis: It’s always been very democratic…by which I mean that it’s generally me who does 100% of repertoire choices, then I put it to the group and everybody complains! But we always find the right balance in the end, and there are usually some nice surprises along the way.

David: What happens between recording sessions is about six months of WhatsApp group chat. We get all excited when we find a date that works for everyone, then realise we have to factor in rehearsals too, and watch people dropping off as we get closer to the date...

Lizzy: A lot of changes happen while we’re recording as well: we start out with quite a big list of repertoire, but when we get into the studio we might find that certain things just don’t suit our voices or don’t quite work in terms of blend.

Francis: For instance, we had to drop the Parsons setting of Ave Maria when we did our first album: nobody was in the right voice on the day we were meant to record it, and we didn’t have the right people. It’s impossible to get more than half of us in a room at once: we managed fourteen singers for the Christmas album and eighteen were involved in this one, but we never had everyone together at the same time. And at one point we were convinced that the Lotti Crucifixus was just never going to happen…I think most of us know that piece off by heart but it’s so hard to get in tune. We did about a hundred takes and carefully stuck them together!

Lizzy: The stakes were so high for that piece – every single choir has recorded it, so we had to do it justice.

Have you changed the way you work in the studio since your debut recording?

Francis: We recorded a couple of numbers on the new album without a conductor, just because of how the schedules worked out. It was originally going to be a kind of swansong to Graham Ross (who conducted us on the previous recording) before he went off to Antarctica to become an explorer…although what actually happened was that he got as far as Argentina and sat there for two weeks waiting for the weather to settle enough for the final leg of the trip! But he did end up completing the piece – apparently, he was inspired enough by the journey itself! There was a bit of arguing without Graham there to arbitrate, but the music-making turned out to be extremely good.

Lizzy: I think any arguments were born out of fear: I’m a bit of a Goody Two-Shoes in that I like having a conductor to tell us what to do, and I like getting it right! I was worried that the ensemble wouldn’t be as tight without someone at the helm, but I agree with Francis – it worked out fine because we listened to each other more and felt things naturally.

David: We do experiment a bit in the sessions, but ultimately we’re the slaves of the audio engineers – I don’t think any of us have strong opinions about recording.

Francis: We’ve had the same team for all three discs: Mike Hatch and Mark Brown, who are just fantastic. I got involved with the editing process for the first time on this album, and the main challenge was removing the traffic noise: we were recording down in Dorset, but the church was quite close to a main road…

How did you discover some of the rarities on the programme?

Francis: The first draft of the programme didn’t include any of those, but I spend all my spare time thinking about how to make a coherent theme (not least so it’s easier to write the liner notes). I knew what we wanted to do Easter Egg-wise, so I tried to form the entire liturgy and pair some famous settings of texts with lesser-known ones.

This whole programme started with the Lobo Lamentations, which I’ve performed with various people over the years. Our dad did his dissertation on Lobo at Cambridge, so he instilled in me that he was a very important composer: Lobo was the inspiration for my polyphony database which I’ve been working on for literally decades, transcribing and cataloguing all of his works. There was very little available online until then. I’ve dug up all those sources and one thing I found during that process was this manuscript of the Lamentations with most of the rests missing...it’s been a nice little crosswordy challenge filling that out.

I’d intended for us to record it at a high pitch with three soprano lines, but as it turned out we were a bit short on higher voices but had lots of basses who were on good form so we put the whole thing down and it ended up working quite well. Once that was in place I wanted to have sets of Lamentations for the other days. I get access to all sorts of catalogues through my work for Early English Church Music, so Ferrabosco came up on my radar; I tracked down all the sources and it turned out to be great.

Henry: I can’t help thinking that we take you for granted sometimes, Francis – it all sounds like a hell of a lot of work!

Francis: It’s just what I do, and it’s great fun! I was up until 1AM last night having an email conversation with an archivist at the Vatican library, like something out of The Da Vinci Code! 

Girolamo Giacobbi’s Caro mea is another real find, and I dug that up for our consort in Dorchester-on-Thames. The core of that group is me, Sophie, Dom and Sophie’s husband Ryan [Wigglesworth, the composer and conductor]: we’re based at the Catholic Church of St Birinus and we always do the entire Holy Week liturgy, which amounts to four or five hours of singing each day. Every week I churn through my database and type up a new mass and a motet or two for Sunday morning, and that’s how I discovered the Giacobbi. We all loved it, and it’s become a regular part of our repertoire.

I should also mention the Ave Regina Caelorum by Neil Wright, who’s an old friend of the family and currently organist at Farnborough Abbey. He was very good friends with our Uncle David and would often pop into Holy Redeemer in Chelsea to play a voluntary or give us one of his pieces to sing. He knows all of us quite well so has a good idea of what will work for our voices, and a few years ago he wrote us a piece for a concert when we were looking for something contemporary. This Ave Regina wasn’t written for us, but it hadn’t been recorded before and we wanted to include it: Neil played around with it and made a few tweaks, and what you hear on the album is the final version.

David: It’s my highlight of the disc – it just works so well for all of us. If anyone wants to write us more slush, then we’re always happy to receive it! We might want to proactively pursue a new commission for our next album…

What might be the focus of that next album?

Francis: I’ve got six discs planned on my spreadsheet, and the fourth is a pretty certain bet - it’s going to be a summer-y album, focusing on English part-songs from the late nineteenth century to the present day.

David: It could’ve been the first programme written by ChatGPT, but that didn’t quite work out, did it…?

Francis: I was exploring the latest version of Grok and wondering if it could uncover some unrecorded gems from that period and genre: I asked all the right questions and got it to spit out thirty or forty pieces with references to where I’d find the manuscripts. It looked like an amazing list, but unfortunately it turned out it had invented the whole lot!

David: We’ve still got a few years before we’re all out of business…

Finally, are any of the next generation of Bevans likely to join the ranks any time soon?

David: Most of them are under-fives so it’s still some way off, but Mary’s son Albie (who’s the oldest by quite some margin) has already expressed an interest…Eventually we’ll start forcing them to make their own choir! Obviously the little ones don’t have the faintest idea of what’s going on with all of this yet, so it’ll be lovely in ten or fifteen years’ time to have so much living proof that we invested all this time and energy in a family choir. It’s already the most important thing that a lot of us have done over the last few years, and I hope it doesn’t stop any time soon.