Nigel Short on A Prayer for Deliverance

Among the highly competitive world of English choral musicmaking, Tenebrae are generally acclaimed as the very best of the best. Their recordings frequently set new benchmarks against which other accounts are measured - of Bruckner motets, Parry part-songs, virtuosic Poulenc and more.

Their latest album combines Herbert Howells's famous Requiem with a breathtaking new work by US composer Joel Thompson, which gives the recording its title - alongside contemplative favourites by Harris, Sullivan, Pearsall and others, and more recent compositions by Marsh, McDowall, Shaw and Pott.

I spoke to Tenebrae's founder and conductor Nigel Short about the process of assembling the programme for this album, rehearsing it and communicating it to audiences.

The centrepiece of this recording is Joel Thompson’s incredible work that gives the album its title. Was this also the starting-point around which you built the rest of the programme?

Well, the Howells Requiem had been knocking around for quite a while, and nearly went on the disc we did ages ago called 'Songs of Farewell' - but we hadn't really performed it quite enough for it to really be inside the group. So I left that off and decided it could just gestate for a lot longer. And I'm glad we did that, because in the end, the way the recording came about was that it was a live concert. It's too special to just take a chance with it, and we really had to know it inside-out and then allow the concert performance to live and breathe - as we always do in live performance - and let the microphones just take that up. 

So the Howells was an important part of me deciding to record the Joel Thompson, whereas the latter was in a sense the instigator or spark - being a new work. And when we had Joel over to the UK to hear us record and perform it for the first time - he was so encouraging that we decided we just had to do it. 

You mention having been deeply emotionally moved by the closing Amen of A Prayer for Deliverance; how do you walk that line between keeping a distance from the music in order to present it convincingly, versus letting one’s own feelings inform the performance?

I don't draw that line at all. I think if you're performing a piece and you're not just letting it do its thing - for you as a performer and the audience - then you're going through the motions. We're very meticulous - some would say I'm relentless...! - in terms of when we're rehearsing, getting the nuts and the bolts right. That's the precision aspect. But we have to do that so that we can reach a point, when we get to the stage to perform it, where we aren't thinking about the nuts and bolts, and that's where the passion comes in.

I take it as a good sign that over the past twenty-five years, singers have often found themselves extremely moved by our performances. We try to create a very intense focus, performing to the very best of our ability to make the music come alive, and that can easily overwhelm you, take you over - and sometimes when you least expect it. And if that happens then I think we're doing our job. If we were to just agree in the rehearsal that we're going to take this bit at this speed and so on, and we never left any room for spontaneity, then it would be very boring. 

So no, I don't draw any line; I want the singers completely engaged vocally, mentally and emotionally. And that way we get very highly-charged performances out of them.

I’ve always thought Holst’s Evening-Watch was a bit of a departure for him - those dense, often quite quartal, harmonies. Is there more of this flavour of Holst out there that I just haven’t come across?

There is, but not in his choral works. It tends to be the orchestral works. The superposition of those fourths is incredibly effective, and you get intervals between those notes that then create harmonics (if it's all well-tuned and balanced from the bottom upwards), so you can be forgiven for thinking that there are actually even more notes than there are. 

From the first time I sang it, I thought it was a brilliant piece, but unfortunately there aren't really more pieces like that. Only some orchestral pieces from his neoclassical phase. So it's always stood out for me. 

Why do you think Howells sets the Requiem aeternam text twice in his relatively short Requiem - first a relatively subdued setting, and then a more ecstatic one that seems to have a hint of Take him, earth, for cherishing about it?

I'm not completely sure - maybe some musicologist somewhere knows - but the piece was finished in 1932 and not published for about fifty years. So I think it's possible that he might have written a second version of it with that more harmonically developed and adventurous style compared to when he was younger. 

Take him, earth for cherishing was written just after John F Kennedy's assassination, and it's very highly-charged - and Howells is by then a very different composer, that much more mature, having lived with the experience of losing his son for about twenty years (the Requiem itself was not written for the death of his son - that's a misconception). And maybe Howells added the second setting at a later date to an existing work. He'd already started using the Requiem as the basis for his Hymnus paradisi, and I just wonder if maybe there was a moment when this other setting of the text came to him and he decided it fitted.

And it does fit - it has that feeling of a journey, the whole piece. Or equally it could have been written in the 1930s when he was writing the rest of it, and he was just being more adventurous. 

A couple of these pieces - particularly the Pearsall and Harris - you take relatively fast. These are certainly works that encourage singers and conductors to wallow; were you consciously trying to get away from that habit?

Well, I could definitely respond that maybe you're used to listening to very slow performances...!

I think with the Pearsall, written when it was in the middle of the nineteenth century, choirs tended to be quite a lot bigger than they are nowadays. If you look at the first publication, there is a metronomic guide there as to what it should be, and most performances now are probably done at two-thirds of that speed. For smaller groups - at least, the ones that don't just rely on modern technology and cutting and pasting and editing and such - it's not feasible to do it that slowly. 

We do it slightly slower than the metronomic marking, but then I've got a choir of twenty singers who are technically pretty tip-top. Still, if we take it too slow, they can't sing any phrase without needing another breath. And I think that's a very good guide as to whether or not you've just taken a step in the wrong direction and it's starting to become indulgent. I do also think that within the harmonic journey of each line, all the little moments are linked. If you take it too slowly, each little twist fails to add up or connect properly to the next one, so rather than letting them add tension to where it then breaks out, you're actually defusing the tension as you go along, by allowing each one to ebb just a little bit more than it should. 

There are other examples of this - I recorded Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia with Aurora, and his metronomic markings were taken out of the scores, and we've grown up with these incredibly luscious, symphonic renditions of them. And when we did it, the Vaughan Williams Society had just brought out a new edition with the original metronomic markings back in there, so I followed those. And when I announced it to Aurora at the beginning of the recording sessions, they all cheered! It's so relentless for the players. Our recording is probably two, two and a half minutes faster than many of the big ones. 

It's like singers with their breath, I suppose - the players would otherwise be having to ration out their bowing millimetre by millimetre?

Yes. And the Society folks were also grateful for my having observed what was in the score. It's probably closer to what Vaughan Williams wanted - but because people have got so used to these slow, laborious accounts, reviewers were saying 'oh, it's too fast'. But they're Vaughan Williams's own guidelines that have now gone back in! So I hope that we're entering an era of having performances that are slightly more succinct and closer to what the composer intended, rather than just being drawn out endlessly.

And with the Harris Bring us, O Lord God - again, if you look at the original publication by Novello, the metronomic marking is very quick - minim equals 72, really quick! Definitely in two. We do it slower than that. As a boy when I'd sung the Harris at my church I had sung it slower as well. But during Christopher Robinson's tenure at St George's Windsor I used to sing there as a deputy, and he did it at this faster tempo, and it kind of opened my eyes to how everything flows rather than getting drawn out. You don't want to eke everything out of this bit before moving onto the next bit - it should almost pass you by, and then end with that lingering Amen. So I took my tempo from Christopher Robinson, because it worked so well. And it was very noticeable that the boys at Windsor felt it so naturally, and it made sense to them. That communicated to me the fact that Christopher was probably on the right track. 

At that time I was a lay clerk at Westminster Abbey, and Simon Preston likewise took it quite quickly. If you take it too slowly, with a choir of twenty (when you're also in double choir), all you end up with is having professional singers cheating breaths all over the place - trying to stagger their lines and so on. These composers knew what they wanted, they probably crafted the singers' lines such that it was one phrase, rather than one that had to be broken up by a breath. Why would you compose that way? So, again, historically we've got used to recordings being slow, and getting slower - and I've gone back to something closer to the original tempo that the composer wanted. And I don't have to fight the singers for it - it happens very naturally, it doesn't drag, it doesn't race - so I think that's a good indication that you're doing what the music wants.