On the first Thursday in September, Vivamus returned to rehearsals after the summer break. It was still so mild that the trees outside hadn’t decided whether it was summer or autumn; some had leaves still of vibrant green whereas others were already starting to adopt burnished copper tones.
Inside St Clement Danes Church on the Strand where we rehearse each week though, it is always November – even when we are practicing madrigals in springtime, or carols in Advent. St Clement Dane’s is the central church of the RAF. In the stone floor beneath our feet are inlaid unit badges of Welsh slate. Disbanded squadron standards line the walls. When setting up and packing away at the start and end of each rehearsal, we carry the chairs past memorial books and poppy wreaths and rolls of honour.
It is a liminal space immutably imbued with remembrance.
That first rehearsal back we sang through Howells’ Requiem, the headline piece for our 7 November 2025 concert. Even through our sight reading stumbles and slip ups, there was already a sense that this was something special. At the end of rehearsal, Rufus Frowde (our immeasurable choir director) gave us the context of the piece – he had wanted us to sing it first before we knew the heartbreaking reason why my eyes had inexplicably welled up at particular points.
Herbert Howells first composed his Requiem in around 1932, but after the death of his young son Michael from polio a few years later he repurposed much of the Requiem for his fully orchestrated Hymn Paradis, which was intended for Michael’s memorial. The result was that his original acapella Requiem became irrevocably tainted with the overwhelming grief for his child and so Howells put the manuscript away – for 50 years. Howells’ Requiem remained unpublished until 1980, and even today many choral aficionados are unfamiliar with the emotive heartbreaking loss and beauty of this two choir setting of the mass for the deceased.
Rufus has a talent for putting together a perfectly balanced concert programme that draws together pieces that span decades and compositional styles, and our November concert was no exception. Alongside Howells’ Requiem we sang Harris’ “Holy is the True Light”, Will Todd’s “Remembrance”, Finzi’s “Lo the Full and Final Sacrifice”, Mark Sirrett’s “After the War”, and Eleanor Daley’s “In Remembrance”.
We were joined by Martin Ford as our brilliant organist for the evening who, as well as lending that magical weight and power of the pipes to our accompanied pieces, performed a number of beautiful organ solos by William Walton including one of his most well known pieces: Battle of Britain. Walton himself was exempted from WWII service in order to compose music for wartime propaganda films. However his older brother, Charles Noel Watson, signed up to serve in WWI in 1917 (less than two weeks after his eighteenth birthday) and – rather fittingly for our venue – transferred to the RAF on the day it was first formed on 1 April 1918.
As an encore, we sang “O Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem” by Martin Hindmarsh who we occasionally have the pleasure of rehearsing and performing with. Our programme spoke to the theme of remembrance of those who have gone before us, particularly those who laid down their lives in service of generations yet to come.
The inscription on Howells’ 9 year old son’s gravestone reads “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also”. At the pinnacle of his Requiem we sing “et lux perpetua luceat eis” – let perpetual light shine upon them. Although he set these words before losing his son, it’s impossible to sing them without imagining what treasure would have been illuminated for Howells in the years to come when he heard them again.
The shadow of AI looms large in all spaces these days, but I worry a lot about the risk of its influence in the arts. These tools can put together notes and words to create something we recognise as music – but when we outsource creativity, community and connection in this way, I can’t help but think we are handing over our precious treasure to an algorithm without a heart.
And an algorithm can’t understand what it was to perform our Remembrance concert this year as a choir, bringing our own stories and souls and memories to the music. To sing a piece that existed only as scribbled notes and grief and heartbreak for decades before being reassembled and brought into the light of day, now paired in a concert programme with other works on death and sacrifice written in different generations but with a common thread and language of loss that crosses all divides.
To do so in front of an audience scattered with glints of scarlet poppies, surrounded by the regalia and paraphernalia of decades of service and sacrifice for a common good, in a time where every day we are confronted with images of conflict across the globe.
To sing a requiem shaded with a father’s grief in memory of a single small coffin, buried so long ago, but whose light shines perpetually bright in the sound of voices lifted up to vaulted ceilings above.
I know where my treasure is. It’s in a church in the middle of the Strand, every Thursday night, where it is always November.
In memoriam
Michael Kendrick Howells
12 April 1926 – 6 September 1935
Post written by Sophie Cass.