Houston Chamber Choir fetes great British composer, late Queen at once

In the past couple of weeks, the death of Queen Elizabeth has put a global spotlight on British culture, not least its rich and glorious tradition of sublime choral music. This is, after all, the nation where a prime-time BBC program called “Songs of Praise” has been running for upward of 60 years.

Certainly Houston Chamber Choir founder and artistic director Robert Simpson has lately been thinking about the choir’s upcoming season opener — “Let All the World in Every Corner Sing,” a celebration of British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams — in an entirely different light.

“The concert started as being a tribute to one man’s influence on his country’s music,” Simpson said. “And now for me, with the Queen’s death and our reflection on all that she lived for, I now feel as if the concert is now broadening to the influence that Vaughan Williams’ country has had on the music of the world.”

Born in 1872, making 2022 his sesquicentennial year, Vaughan Williams is today regarded as the quintessentially British composer, rivaled only by Handel, Elgar, Britten, Walton and precious few others. Despite once studying for six months with the German composer Max Bruch, he consciously distanced himself from continental influences and instead studied and embraced the music of the British Isles, both traditional folk songs and the work of Elizabethan-era composers William Byrd and Thomas Tallis. This reverence is particularly apparent in Vaughan Williams’ choral music, Simpson says.

“Even his most contemporary or challenging works still have a flavor of modality and of a lingering heritage that you feel as if this is something that is growing out of a strong historic base,” he explained. “But beyond that, he knows how to allow the voice to sing and to ring and to create lines that make people glad to be able to join their voices with others. It’s a deeply satisfying experience to sing Vaughan Williams’ music.”

Inevitably, Vaughan Williams’ career brushed against Britain’s late monarch. At her 1953 coronation, the hymns included his arrangement of “Old Hundredth,” a setting of the 100th Psalm; and “O Taste and See,” taken from the 34th Psalm. “Old Hundredth,” Simpson notes, marked the first time at a British coronation that the congregation was permitted to join in song.

Aided by guests Yuri McCoy, organist of South Main Baptist Church, and the Paragon Brass Ensemble, the chamber choir will present a broad survey of Vaughan Williams’ career, including Three Shakespeare Songs; Five Mystical Songs (from which the title selection comes); and the organ piece “Rhosymedre.” Simpson has also chosen selections by three eminent composers who had a meaningful impact on Vaughan Williams’ life: C. Hubert H. Parry, author of the British anthems “Jerusalem” and “I Was Glad”; Maurice Ravel, the French modernist with whom Vaughan Williams struck an unlikely bond; and Charles Villiers Stanford, with whom Vaughan Williams studied at the Royal College of Music.

Richard Hyde, Her Majesty’s consul general for the district including Houston, will also be on hand to speak to speak about the influence of Vaughan Williams’ music on his native country. The centerpiece of the concert, though, is Vaughan Williams’ Mass in G minor, written in 1922. Supposedly the first a cappella Mass written since the 16th century, the 25-minute work is both historically significant and musically stirring; says Simpson, “this is not an exercise.”

“He was absolutely breaking new ground,” he continues. “No one had ever written a piece of that size, a sacred Mass, in centuries; and he does it in a way that pays respect to the traditions of Tallis and Byrd but also creates a sound-world that is very 20th century as well. It’s an extraordinarily moving experience to sing it, and I believe it is to hear it as well.”

All in all, not bad for a composer who referred to himself as a “cheerful agnostic.”

“It’s clear from the very beginning, just the modal line that he creates for the ‘Kyrie’ or the magical opening of the ‘Gloria,’” Simpson says. “There’s this rich, eight-part chord that comes in that says, ‘OK, Ralph, you may not have been a believer, but you sure feel the significance of the text.’”

- Chris Gray