St Clement Danes, Strand, Thursday 15 October 2026
Welcome to this evening’s concert, in which William Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices will be interwoven throughout a programme of sacred and secular music exploring light, darkness, endings and new beginnings. The concert will open with William Harris’ Bring us, O Lord God, a setting for double choir of words originally by John Donne. The programme will also include Herbert Howells’ Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, written for a memorial service for President John F. Kennedy; Stephanie Martin’s A Frost Sequence; Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow; Lucy Walker’s Give Me Your Stars; and Laura Mvula’s Sing to the Moon.
The concert is dedicated to the memory of the choir’s co-founder and long-term bass, Chris Hanson-Abbott; and stalwart librarian and tenor, Phil Rowlands, both of whom we lost this summer.
Programme
Bring us, O Lord God
William H. Harris (1883–1973)
Sir William Henry Harris spent his working life at the centre of the English choral tradition: New College and Christ Church, Oxford, and then nearly three decades as Organist of St George’s Chapel, Windsor. Bring us, O Lord God dates from 1959, composed towards the end of that Windsor career, and stands as the mature companion to Faire is the Heaven (1925). Both are unaccompanied motets for double choir; both are in D flat major; both share a warm, diatonic language.
The words are not a poem but a prayer: a passage from near the end of a sermon Donne preached at Whitehall on 29 February 1628, adapted for the anthem by Eric Milner-White. Its rhetoric works by cancelling opposites: “no darkness nor dazzling, no noise nor silence, no fears nor hopes” until each pair resolves into something ‘equal’ and unbroken. Harris writes for two four-part choirs that answer, overlap and shadow one another, so that the phrases arrive doubled and softened, as though heard at a slight distance. The music gathers to a full-throated climax at “the habitations of thy glory and dominion” before withdrawing. The most inward writing is saved for the coda, which seems to settle in B flat major before the final chord restores the work’s opening radiance.
Mass for Four Voices: Kyrie
William Byrd (c. 1540–1623)
Byrd’s three Masses are among the strangest publications of the Elizabethan age: three sets of partbooks, each no more than a folded sheet, issued around 1592–95 with no title page, no dedication, no date and no printer’s name, for a readership that could not admit to owning them. Byrd was a Catholic in a Protestant state, tolerated at court because the Queen valued him, and these settings were written not for a cathedral but for the private chapels of recusant households – sung quietly, perhaps one voice to a part. The Mass for Four Voices, which is probably the first of the three, is the most concentrated.
The Kyrie is disarmingly brief: three short paragraphs, each opening with a fragment of imitation that the other voices pick up almost conversationally. In little more than two minutes, the movement is over before it has settled.
A Frost Sequence
Stephanie Martin (b. 1962)
For decades Robert Frost’s poems were effectively closed to composers: his estate guarded them jealously, and at least one well-known choral work – Eric Whitacre’s Sleep – exists with different words because permission was refused. When Frost’s 1923 collection New Hampshire, containing two of these poems, entered the public domain in the United States in 2019, a door opened.
A Frost Sequence was written by the Canadian composer Stephanie Martin in Toronto in January 2021, during lockdown. Martin conceived the three poems as a continuous set rather than three separate part-songs. Each looks at time from a different angle: ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’ is eight lines on how quickly life passes; ‘The Road Not Taken’ was written for Frost’s friend Edward Thomas and turns on a choice that cannot be unmade and a story the speaker knows he will later embroider; ‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’ holds the pull of stillness against the pull of obligation and refuses to resolve it.
Writing in the isolation of the pandemic, Martin wrote that she had no idea if A Frost Sequence would ever be sung: a thought that gives its preoccupation with passing time an extra edge.
Mass for Four Voices: Gloria
William Byrd (c. 1540–1623)
The Gloria is the first movement in which Byrd has a long text to shape, and he responds by alternating two quite different manners: crisp, near-homophonic declamation where the words tumble over each other in praise, and spacious imitative writing where a single phrase is turned over at length.
The opening acclamations move quickly, mainly syllable for syllable. Then at ‘Qui tollis peccata mundi, miserere nobis’ the texture thins to three voices, the lines separate, and the same plea returns three times with mounting insistence. Byrd was setting these words for people who could not sing them in public, and the petitions for mercy carry a weight that goes beyond liturgical convention.
The closing ‘Cum Sancto Spiritu’ gathers the voices into exuberant writing, capped by a brief ‘Amen’.
and the swallow
Caroline Shaw (b. 1982)
Caroline Shaw was thirty when she became the youngest ever winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music, for Partita for 8 Voices. and the swallow was written in 2017 for the Netherlands Chamber Choir, setting verses from Psalm 84. The psalm’s most quoted image is the small bird that has somehow found a place to nest inside the temple precincts, a picture of belonging that Shaw approached while thinking about people who have lost exactly that. The piece was composed against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crisis, and the question underneath it is not devotional but plain: where does anyone put their young?
Musically it feels close to folk song as well as to anthem; the setting of “the autumn rains also cover it with pools” has a rain-like quality, syllables falling in soft, overlapping patterns before the music comes to rest.
Deus, portus pacis
Cecilia McDowall (b. 1951)
Cecilia McDowall is among the most widely commissioned choral composers working in Britain, and part of the reason is her taste in texts. She has built pieces from the Shipping Forecast, from Leonardo’s notebooks, from the memoir of a Syrian teenager who crossed Europe in a wheelchair, and, here, from a medieval English verse rendering of Boethius.
The words are John Walton’s: an Augustinian canon of Osney Abbey at Oxford, he completed a verse translation of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy in 1410, and the lines sung here are his rendering of one of its poems, to which McDowall adds the Latin refrain ‘Deus, portus pacis’. Boethius wrote the Consolation in prison awaiting execution, and its cast of mind is all here: God addressed not as judge or king but as ‘portus pacis’, the harbour of peace – an image for people who expect the sea to be rough.
In McDowall’s setting, her plainest gesture is indeed for the word ‘pacis’ itself, where the voices arrive together in simple block harmony and the motion briefly stops. It is a small effect and an unusually telling one: after all the layering, peace turns out to be the moment when everything agrees.
A Fancy
William Byrd (c. 1540–1623)
Two great manuscript anthologies preserve much of William Byrd’s keyboard music: My Ladye Nevells Booke, copied in 1591, and the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, compiled a generation later. The ‘fancy’ – fantasia – was the freest form available to him. It has no dance pattern to obey, no words to serve, no borrowed plainsong to decorate: the composer simply proposes a theme and follows it wherever it leads. In practice Byrd’s fancies fall into sections that get progressively faster and more elaborate. A grave imitative opening, each voice taking up the subject in turn, gives way to shorter figures, then to running divisions of considerable brilliance, and often to a passage of frank dance rhythm before the close.
Take him, earth, for cherishing
Herbert Howells (1892–1983)
In 1964, the year after President Kennedy’s assassination, plans were laid for a joint American–Canadian memorial service in Washington, and Howells was invited to write an unaccompanied work for it. He was left to choose his own text. He turned to a fourth-century Spanish poet, Prudentius, whose hymn for the burial of the dead he had already set in Latin, as a study towards Hymnus Paradisi. That earlier setting he discarded entirely. Instead, he took Helen Waddell’s translation, which he considered faultless, and began again. The motet was finished in the spring of 1964 and first sung in Washington, DC, on 22 November, the first anniversary of Kennedy’s death.
Howells’ nine-year-old son Michael had died of polio in 1935, and many of Howells’ later works circle back to that loss. It is hard not to hear the Kennedy commission as the occasion rather than the subject.
The writing is for divided voices with Howells’ characteristic false relations catching the light at unexpected moments. The final section, moving into radiance, is among the most consoling pages in the English repertoire, and perhaps has special significance for Vivamus given the dedicatees tonight.
Mass for Four Voices: Sanctus, Benedictus
William Byrd (c. 1540–1623)
The Sanctus is the point in the Mass where the liturgy claims that those present have joined something already in progress: the words are angelic, overheard by Isaiah in the temple, and the congregation borrows them. The movement begins with a single voice and develops via imitation between the four voice parts. From there the music broadens. ‘Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua’ is given to the upper three voices, and the ‘Hosanna in excelsis’ that follows restores all four.
The Benedictus opens with the voices in pairs for the blessing of the one ‘who comes in the name of the Lord’ before the Hosanna returns, varied rather than simply repeated.
Give me your stars
Lucy Walker (b. 1998)
Lucy Walker wrote Give me your stars in 2025 for octet VOCES8’s twentieth anniversary.
The poem is Sara Teasdale’s ‘Peace’, from her 1915 collection Rivers to the Sea. Twelve lines, three stanzas, rhyming abba cddc effe – and, characteristically for Teasdale, built on a single image held steadily in view. The speaker is a tide pool: filled by the sea and then not emptied again. The poem’s turn comes in the last stanza, where the pool of blue that mirrored the daytime sky becomes a pool of gold at sunset, and the closing line asks for the night’s stars to be poured in too.
Walker takes her title from that final line – a telling choice, since it shifts the emphasis from the settled state to the request. Her setting opens with a melody she describes as “a gentle, fluid arc that mimics the movement of waves.” The final line of the poem provides a “comforting and distant sense of cyclicity” as we hear the opening notes for a final time.
Mass for Four Voices: Agnus Dei
William Byrd (c. 1540–1623)
The Agnus Dei sets three invocations of the Lamb of God, and Byrd treats them as a single expanding gesture. The first is for two voices only. The second adds a third. The third brings in all four – so that the texture grows across the movement, each repetition arriving with more weight behind it than the last.
Then comes ‘dona nobis pacem’. Byrd slows almost to a standstill and writes a passage of extraordinary harmonic pain, suspension piled on suspension. The phrase is repeated, and repeated again, the dissonances biting harder each time. It is seen by many as one of the summits of Renaissance polyphony.
It is also, perhaps, a political statement. Byrd wrote ‘grant us peace’ for Catholic households living under fines, surveillance and more, singing behind closed doors. Four hundred years later the specific grievance has receded and the plea for peace – for people of all faiths and none – has not. The music does not end with comfort; it simply stops asking.
Sing to the Moon
Laura Mvula (b. 1986), Steven James Brown (1954–2024), arranged Laura Mvula
Sing to the Moon, the title track of Laura Mvula’s 2013 debut album, is about endurance rather than escape: waiting out something that has not yet passed, addressed to whoever needs to hear it. Mvula took the title from a saying of the singer Adelaide Hall’s father, which she found in Hall’s biography: “sing to the moon and the stars will shine.” The choral version is Mvula’s own, written for the BBC Singers.
Which makes it an unexpectedly apt close to this programme. Almost everything before it has been a form of prayer sung by people in circumstances they did not choose: Donne’s dying man imagining light, Byrd’s recusants asking for peace, Frost stopping in the snow with miles still to go, Shaw’s homeless, Boethius’ bonded, Howells’ bereaved, Teasdale’s starless pool. Mvula’s song springs from similar circumstances for the same thing in language of the current century, and Vivamus ends where the concert title suggests: singing into moon-illumined dark.
Performers
Vivamus
Vivamus is a small, London-based chamber choir that enjoys singing a diverse and challenging range of repertoire, from well-known classics to new works by living composers. We rehearse weekly at St Clement Danes Church (the RAF church) and aim to perform at least four times a year in central London, at St Clement Danes; St Martin-in-the-Fields; and St James’s, Piccadilly, among other venues. We also go on away weekends to sing in UK cathedrals and other venues.
Rufus Frowde, Musical Director
A freelance conductor, organist, pianist and composer, Rufus was Organist and Assistant Director of Music at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace from 2003 to 2023 as well as a long-serving Musical Director of Surrey Youth Choir. He has been the Musical Director of Vivamus chamber choir since 2008. He is also the Accompanist of Hertfordshire Chorus, one of the UK’s finest symphonic choirs. He became Artistic Director of The English Chamber Choir in 2024.
Rufus studied music as an Organ Scholar at Merton College, Oxford University. He subsequently became Organ Scholar of Worcester Cathedral and undertook prize-winning postgraduate study in Choral Direction and Church Music at the Royal Academy of Music.
Rufus has always maintained a versatile approach to music-making, seeking to ensure that barriers to quality music-making are overcome. Alongside his work as a professional musician, he nurtures the music at his local primary school (Samuel Lucas JMI School, Hitchin) and works as an animateur for the Chorister Outreach Project at St Albans Cathedral.
Rufus’ performances have included numerous UK cathedrals, Westminster Abbey, La Madeleine (Paris), Kaunas Cathedral, St Thomas’s Leipzig, St Paul’s Basilica (Rome), Cologne Cathedral, Haarlem Cathedral and Longwood Gardens (Pennsylvania). He has worked with musicians and performers including Emma Johnson, Crispian Steele Perkins, Kiri te Kanawa, José Carreras, Ian McMillan and Michael Rosen. He works with numerous orchestras as a guest conductor, including The Hanover Band, Brandenburg Sinfonia, Southbank Sinfonia and the Brandenburg Baroque Soloists in collaboration with his choirs.
Rufus appears as a conductor, organist and composer on the Signum Classics, Resonus Classics, Diversions and Divine Art record labels and his work is frequently broadcast on national radio and television. Rufus was awarded Her Majesty’s Diamond and Platinum Jubilee Medals as well as a 2023 Coronation Medal.
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