Benjamin Nicholas on (more!) Orchestrated Anthems

When Merton College Choir's first volume of 'Orchestral Anthems' came out in 2023 it offered a musical revelation - some of the greatest works in the Anglican tradition, heard with symphonic soundworlds rather than the organ (thrilling as that, of course, can be). I spoke to director Benjamin Nicholas about it at the time, and he assured me that there would not be long to wait before a volume 2 materialised.

Well, here it is - as before, a combination of orchestral originals (later adapted for organ) and orchestrated versions of works initially scored for just choir and organ. The centrepieces are Stanford's Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in A major, and Wesley's Ascribe unto the Lord, though Ireland's ever-popular Greater Love also receives the same treatment - with equally gripping results. 

I caught up with Benjamin once again to find out more about these eye-opening accounts, that shake the dust of familiarity off regularly-performed works and show them in a new light.

** Note: Owing to a manufacturing error, the physical CDs for this product have been delayed. Copies are expected to become available in about a week's time, but can be pre-ordered now. **

Stanford’s Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in A are almost always heard in their versions for choir and organ, but this instrumental recording is actually of the original version rather than a subsequent orchestration. What was the context for its composition and first performance?

The Festival of the Sons of the Clergy (established 1655) is the oldest choral festival in the Anglican Communion. It continues to this day at St Paul’s Cathedral as a service for the Clergy Support Trust (formerly the Corporation of the Sons of the Clergy) and is usually sung by the Choir of St Paul’s and two guest cathedral choirs. In the 19th century, so many areas of the musical life of St Paul’s were re-energised by John Stainer, not least this music festival. Early festivals had included choral works – with orchestral accompaniment – by Purcell, Handel, Boyce and Greene; in 1873, Stainer revived the tradition of commissioning a new work with orchestral forces, by premiering his own Canticles in A. As is the case with much of the orchestrated church music from this period, the orchestral parts are now sadly missing. On 12 May 1880, Stainer conducted the premiere of Stanford’s setting in A (his fourth setting of the Evening Canticles).

Listening to this version I was struck by how light and spacious the texture is. The held string E before the choir’s first entry is so much more alive here than when it’s just an organ key being held down! How much do you think organists can (or should) try to capture the feeling of the orchestral version in their registrations, tempi and so on?

I agree that the music sounds completely at home when played in its original version, and I find that it’s not an easy fit in the organ-only arrangement. That said, I have heard many organists make a terrific job of this accompaniment – it’s just that it’s not as idiomatically written for the organ as his other accompaniments. Beyond solos on a flute, clarinet or a trumpet (or tuba) you cannot really recreate the sounds of the orchestra, and so I think that the best approach is to make it work as well as it can as an organ piece. It’s perfectly possible to replicate Stanford’s tempi on the organ, but it is certainly quite fiddly to grade the dynamics as smoothly as one hears in the original orchestral version. Keeping in mind that organists at the end of the 19th century and early 20th century didn’t have all the playing aids that we now enjoy, one can only imagine that there were not quite as many registration changes in Stanford’s day as we might hear today!

The other thing that really hit me was how Brahmsian it all was - really strong echoes of the second symphony in particular. It’s known that Brahms’s music made an impact on Stanford - was this influence especially strong when he was writing the Service in A?

This composition comes just after a period when Stanford combined his work in Cambridge as Organist of Trinity College with visits to study in Leipzig and, latterly, Berlin. Joseph Joachim mentored Stanford and, as a regular visitor to the UK, encouraged him in his promotion of Brahms’ music in Cambridge. As the newly appointed conductor of Cambridge University Musical Society, Stanford conducted an early performance of the German Requiem, and in 1877 he organised the first English performance of Brahms’ 1st Symphony, conducted by Joachim.

In terms of the construction of the Magnificat, Brahms’ 2nd Symphony was clearly an inspiration to Stanford. The restraint in the orchestration, making much of the wind, gives a classical feel to the sound, and the spirit of the dance is another obvious characteristic – during one of the Leipzig study trips, Stanford took an excursion to Vienna where he heard Strauss waltzes, under Strauss! And Stanford’s visit to Bayreuth to hear the second cycle of Wagner’s Ring Cycle may be felt in the Nunc Dimittis: Jeremy Dibble in his notes for the CD booklet highlights “the Valhalla-like interjection of the trumpet at the climax”.

Wesley’s Ascribe unto the Lord and Ireland’s Greater Love, on the other hand, are subsequent transcriptions (by their respective composers) of organ-based originals. How much difference do you notice in these versions? The woodwind colours in the Wesley certainly jumped out at me at a few points.

Wesley’s challenge when orchestrating Ascribe was to add enough rhythmic bite to the recitative sections, so that a chorus of some 400 at the Three Choirs Festival could be energised into singing rhythmically. Essentially, the strings take the role of the organ in creating a sustained sound and the brass add little interjections which set the ATB phrases alight. I think that it’s really effective and the organ-only version sounds rather dull to me by comparison! The use of the wind in the ‘O worship the Lord’ quartet sounds as though it has always been intended for those instruments. What I wasn’t expecting was the pizzicato strings in the ‘They that make them are like unto them’ verse – that’s a wonderful texture, adding rhythmic precision to a section that could easily get slower. This orchestration is full of Wesley’s little tricks for keeping a large chorus on track!

Jeremy Dibble’s sleeve notes make a comparison between some of these works and the much older traditions of the verse anthem and cantata. Does this affect how you approach them in actual performance, or are these more observations on their musical ancestry?

The decision that one has to make is whether to use solo voices or not. When we perform the Wesley at Merton, I do use individual solo voices, but for the recording I took the view that Wesley was upscaling the sound-world of the accompaniment, and that (young) solo voices would not provide a perfect balance. We sing ‘O worship the Lord’ and “They that make them’ tutti. We do use soloists for that lovely last solo passage in the last chorus “both small and great”.

I’ve sung Walton’s wonderful The Twelve a couple of times but one detail of its triumphant fugal conclusion hailing the Apostles has always bothered me: ‘envisaging each in an oval glory, let us praise them all with a merry noise’. What exactly is an ‘oval glory’?

In this context, it could be a reference to the ‘mandorla’, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “an almond-shaped panel or decorative space, usually framing an image of Christ’. The oval is also seen as the intersection of two circles, representing heaven and earth, time and eternity.