St Dunstan-in-the-West, Thursday 10 April 2025
A week before the end of Lent, Vivamus is delighted to perform this beautifully reflective programme of music.
In the distinctive octagonal interior of St Dunstan-in-the West church – rebuilt on its current site in 1831, and home to the Anglican and Eastern Churches Association – the programme will include works spanning almost four centuries.
Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week – completed in 1923 but first performed only in 2014 – occupies the second half of the programme. The composer went to great lengths to write the piece in secret in Petrograd and then to get it published abroad once he learned sacred music was notionally to be banned in Russia from December 1923.
The rest of the choral programme comprises more familiar pieces by Allegri, Lotti and Tallis, similarly shot through with messages about redemption.
Members of the choir will also read carefully selected poems.
Programme
Crucifixus – Antonio Lotti (c. 1667–1740)
Antonio Lotti was a composer of the Baroque period who spent around 50 years of his life in the musical service of St Mark’s Basilica, Venice’s principal church. Lotti’s Crucifixus for eight parts is part of a Credo, or setting of the Nicene Creed, written while Lotti was working at the court of Dresden in 1717–1719. Lotti’s setting employs a richly imitative texture, with vocal lines entering one at a time and building up a complex, layered sound. The opening and concluding sections are rich in dissonance while the middle section sets the words ‘sub Pontio Pilato’ (under Pontius Pilate) in almost exultant fashion, perhaps gesturing towards the fulfilment of prophecy. Interestingly, this piece featured on one of the few known performances of any part of Passion Week: a joint 1934 performance in Pau, France, of ‘the magnficent Crucifixus of Lotti and Arise, O God of Steinberg.’
Miserere – Gregorio Allegri (1582–1652)
Gregorio Allegri was a singer, composer and priest who spent most of his life in Rome. From 1629 he sang in the papal choir, for which he wrote his Miserere, a setting of Psalm 51 without a Gloria Patri performed in the papal chapel during the Maundy Thursday Matins (or Tenebrae) service to the light of a single candle hidden behind the altar. Allegri’s composition has a complex history to say the least; the famous top note in the version performed tonight was not found in any performing edition before 1951. Whether Allegri’s relatively simple and old-fashioned composition or the ‘post-Mahler’ version heard today is more to one’s taste, it is hoped Vivamus’s performance will leave the audience ‘pleased [as if] with the sacrifice of righteousness.’
Note: Vivamus’s performance tonight will omit Sections 4 to 11 inclusive of the 20 sections of the full work.
The Lamentations of Jeremiah (I) – Thomas Tallis (c. 1505–1585)
Thomas Tallis was an English composer and organist, the teacher of William Byrd, and unreformed Catholic whose compositional flexibility allowed him to serve in the Chapel Royal under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I amid frequent religious changes at court. The Lamentations of Jeremiah (I) and (II) are two separate compositions setting the first two lessons at Tenebrae. As was customary, Tallis set the announcement of the lesson, the Hebrew letters separating the verses, and the refrain, ‘Ierusalem, Ierusalem.’ This concert will feature only The Lamentations of Jeremiah (I). Nonetheless, a broad gamut of expressive materials is used in this evocation of the siege and destruction of Jerusalem: even in the highly contrasting settings of the Hebrew letters Aleph and Bet and in the composer’s startling use of dissonance at the beginning and end of the work.
Passion Week – Maximilian Steinberg (1885–1946)
Maximilian Steinberg, the composer of Passion Week (PW) was born in 1883 in Vilnius, Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. He left major compositional and teaching legacies; among his composition pupils was Dmitry Shostakovich. PW draws on Church Slavonic chant with associations with multiple geographies. Its evocation of Christ’s being absented from earthly life finds a parallel of sorts in PW’s absence from full liturgical or concert performance for more than ninety years. Steinberg went to great lengths to write PW in secret in Petrograd, and then to get it published abroad once he learned sacred music was notionally to be banned in Russia from December 1923, less than a month after he had completed PW: his notebook contains the entry, ‘ … there is no hope of hearing Passion Week … new values have not been created, while the old are humiliated.’
The progressive ban on church music was far from the only restriction placed on Soviet citizens. Confining this introductory text to Steinberg’s circle, the scholar Oksana Lukonina has suggested Steinberg’s motivations in writing included sad events such as the arrest of his brother-in-law, Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov. The medievalist and author of PW’s Latin translation Vsevolod Bahktin was later to spend more than a decade in incarceration. However, given PW’s dramatic arc from dark to light, and prominent exposition of chant material, perhaps one may choose to focus on Lukonina’s view that in PW, Steinberg sought also to express from the perspective of Russian liturgical music a nostalgic longing for archetypal meaning and beauty.
We are performing selected texts from the work to represent every day of the Passion Week.
Words from six Russian Orthodox liturgical contexts in Holy Week; transliteration bespoke and featuring accent marks to clarify the textual stresses.
Alleluia
PW opens with a short Alleluia, which in liturgical use may be accompanied by a priestly intonation including the words, ‘Bring evils upon … the glorious ones of the earth.’ Despite Movement 1’s brevity, it contains four melismatic treatments of the ‘u’ of alleluia, a word descended from Hebrew that means ‘Praise the Lord.’
Behold, the Bridegroom Comes
Steinberg wrote Movements 1 and 2 together on a single bundle of manuscript paper, finishing them on 6 June 1921. Liturgically they and Movement 3 relate to the ‘Bridegroom’ Matins of Great Monday–Great Wednesday in Holy Week. The text of Movement 2 stresses the need for vigilance and devotion.
Thy Bridal Chamber
Movement 3 is a spacious and gentle plea to be allowed to attend the ‘wedding’ of salvation. Notably, it contains five or more long, descending chant phrases in the tenor and other parts.
Of Thy Mystical Supper
Orthodox religious thought gives some weight to earthly suffering, and this movement gives a sense of this with its long winding phrases building towards the words, ‘but like a thief I will confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom.’ A sense of unresolved anxiety or sparseness is perhaps created by the use of a two-note combination rather than a full chord at the end of the movement.
The Wise Thief
This movement introduces a lighter tone and fans out from three upper voices to an eventual seven parts. The (twice-stated) text prays that the speaker may be saved in much the same way as the wise thief of the title.
Do Not Lament Me, O Mother
This movement is an imagined plea from the entombed Christ featuring a tenor part that could be described as agonised, thrilling or heroic. After an abrupt change in tempo the text promises the glory of the resurrection for Christ and those who believe in Him.
Arise, O God
The last two movements of PW are the longest. This movement is a thrilling and sonorous setting in up to ten parts of the idea, ‘Arise, O God, and judge the earth, for Thou shalt inherit all the nations.’
Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
Like settings of this text in other traditions, this movement does not allow for excessive keeping of silence. Indeed, after luxuriating over certain phrases (the main section takes more than twice as long as Bairstow’s famous setting of the English version of the text), the music gets even slower as a heavenly host rounds out the piece with emphatic, stately and at times almost bluesy cries of the word with which PW begins: ‘Alleluia!’
Performers
Vivamus
Vivamus is a small, London-based chamber choir who 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 RAF church and aim to perform at least four times a year at venues in and around central London, including St Martin-in-the-Fields and St James’, Piccadilly. We also organise away weekends to sing in UK cathedrals.
Rufus Frowde, Musical Director
Rufus read music at Oxford University (where he was Conductor of the Oxford University Philharmonia, Organ Scholar of Merton College and a tenor in Schola Cantorum. He performed his Finals Recital as a violinist). He subsequently became Organ Scholar of Worcester Cathedral. In 2003, Rufus took up his post as Organist and Assistant Director of Music at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace. He combined this with prize-winning postgraduate study in Choral Direction and Church Music at the Royal Academy of Music before embarking on a freelance career as a conductor, organist, accompanist and composer. He joined Vivamus in 2008.
He is a passionate educator and is heavily involved in the work of Hertfordshire Music Service as an orchestral conductor and animateur (most notably as Artistic and Musical Director of the Hertfordshire Schools’ Galas at the Royal Albert Hall) and with the Chorister Outreach Programme at St Albans Cathedral. He also delivers the music curriculum at Samuel Lucas Primary School, Hitchin.
Rufus appears as a conductor and organist on the Divine Art, Diversions, Resonus Classics and Signum Classics labels and has broadcast on national television and radio. Contemporary music features highly in Rufus’s diary and he has conducted and played for numerous premieres including works by Judith Weir, Richard Allain, Ben Parry, Anne Dudley, Graham Ross, Sasha Johnson Manning, Richard Sisson and Will Todd. He has given organ recitals at numerous UK cathedrals and at Westminster Abbey. He is also active as a composer. His carol ‘Adam lay bounden’ was given its premiere at the Annual Carol Service for the Royal Academy of Arts.
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