Once upon a time there was a large cupboard in the corner of the organ loft in the chapel at Trinity College, Cambridge, which housed a huge array of loose music manuscripts and uncatalogued volumes of keyboard music. It was, to put it politely, disordered. Stephen Layton (Director of Music) and I (Organ Scholar) had both started at Trinity College in autumn 2006 and early on agreed the cupboard needed tackling. Most of it turned out to be nineteenth and twentieth century organ music belonging to one of Stephen’s predecessors – Alan Gray – who had held the post between 1893-1930. In amongst the mountains of old organ music, however, lay a few more recent additions…
Within the stacks of loose sheets, I spotted something signed by Francis Grier. It was handwritten manuscript, and the dozen-or-so pages were all out of order. I was familiar with Grier’s music and liked it. I salvaged the loose manuscript and took it to my room. Playing it through at the piano, I was immediately captivated by the texts and the musical sound world.
I then largely forgot about it until I was in my fourth year, with a little more time around the edges of the academic work to return to it. I reached out to the previous director of music, Richard Marlow, to find out what he could tell me. He spoke enthusiastically about the piece and explained the context of its commission and performance. He was helpful, even sourcing a recording of the original BBC Radio 4 broadcast so I could hear it.
I was captivated and knew instantly that I wanted to put together my own performance. Our Chaplain, Alice Goodman, was extremely kind and generous, helping source and edit the Rowan Williams texts, and involving Sir Geoffrey Hill and Richard Lloyd-Morgan to join her as speakers for the performance. By this point I had written to Francis Grier, who also provided invaluable support. All were in attendance for the performance in Trinity College chapel on Friday 5 March 2010.
Realising this work proved rather a seminal moment for me. It is not particularly long, nor scored for huge forces, but it is the intimacy and intensity which produce something of profound impact. Grier’s music and Williams’ words complement each other perfectly, weaving together to produce a very human and direct experience for the listener.
Sword in the Soul is a piece very dear to me, and it has been the utmost pleasure to record it. I would imagine it will be a new discovery for almost all who listen, but one which I hope resonates with others as much as it has with me.
The Good Friday / Passiontide theme is certainly not under-explored, but I hope the rest of the journey through this album provides some new and enjoyable discoveries. Elgar certainly needs no introduction, but Lux Aeterna and We Will Remember Them both shine a fresh light on a familiar melody and a familiar text respectively. The sharp contrast of Lux Aeterna’s symphonic breadth, alongside the startling simplicity and directness of We Will Remember Them, prove engaging listening.
Bednall’s Finzi-inspired setting of the Song of Simeon canticle has always resonated with me, and I am delighted we were able to commission him to scale the original organ-only accompaniment for orchestra. The music resounds to notes of optimism and content.
Owain Park has written and arranged much for LCS through his position as Composer in Residence. Hail Gladdening Light packs an emotional punch in a short and restrained setting. The solo plainsong-inspired melody against more harmonically advanced wordless choir gives a nice melodic and harmonic link to Grier.
And I saw a new heaven is, I would guess, known to 99% of people who have ever sung in a choir performing sacred music. It is a small, perfectly formed anthem accessible to choirs of all sizes and abilities. I have always felt that, despite its apparent small scale, it has inner grandeur. The first of the two climaxes, ‘Behold the tabernacle of God..’, hints at trumpets and drums. The second climax, ‘…for the former things are passed away…’, suggests full strings. LCS commissioned Park to bring these orchestral sonorities to life. His skilful adaptation of Bainton’s notes exploits these different textures and colours in the best possible way, serving to enhance the words and melodies of this miniature masterpiece.

Michael Waldron

In 1991 Francis Grier was commissioned by BBC Radio 4 to write a piece to accompany a sequence of texts for Good Friday, which fell that year on March 29. The new work, Sword in the Soul: Music for Good Friday, was broadcast on that day from Trinity College Chapel, Cambridge.
The spoken texts were written by Rowan Williams, at that time the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and a residentiary canon at Christ Church Cathedral, Oxford. Introducing the piece and interspersing the texts were Grier’s seven movements, scored for the unusual combination of choir with choral standout parts, cello, and organ.
Originally a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and later organist at Christ Church, Oxford, Grier himself was not merely steeped in the Anglican tradition but a more wide-ranging musician – notably a pianist who also regularly played chamber music.
Nevertheless in 1985 at the age of 30 he left the world of cathedral services to concentrate on humanitarian work, as well as – increasingly – counselling, psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis: though music itself was certainly not
left behind.
While he continued to compose in what was broadly an Anglican choral tradition, Grier spent a year working at the L’Arche community at Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in India, an experience that widened his musical horizons further, adding the influence of Indian classical music into his highly personal mix.
Sword in the Soul dates from the period following his return from India in 1989 but before he had begun his training as a psychoanalyst. Its diverse textual and musical content – Grier himself selected a varied group of texts to set to music for the choral sections, including two derived from the Orthodox church – demonstrate a wide interest in religion, while the score itself reveals the impact of non-Western and more especially Indian music in its rhythmical freedom, its long, melismatic melodic lines, and its improvisatory quality.
The result is an immediate and eloquent work that also encompasses the intimate drama of its subject. While the speakers of Williams’ texts are those individuals most closely connected to Jesus at the time of the Crucifixion, Grier’s varied musical settings are comparable to the arias and choruses of much larger works in the Passion tradition, such as those by Bach.
In their own highly individual way, they cover a wide range, from statements of interior spirituality in ‘We venerate the wood of thy Cross’ to the wild and furious complaint of ‘O Lord, thou hast duped me’, to the anguished lyricism of ‘Lovely tears of lovely eyes’ (which sets in translation an anonymous 14th-century German text), to the sorrow of the Dialogue between cello and organ (marked ‘piangente’ – weeping – at one point), to the unaccompanied ‘O Cross of Christ’, to the mixture of wonder and outrage in the final movement, ‘Today he who hung the earth upon the water’, with its beautiful — and surprising — closing chords.
Owain Park’s ‘Hail, gladdening Light’ exists independently but also forms the second section of his three-part choral piece, Phos hilaron (‘Gladdening Light’ in Greek), completed in 2017. Dating from not later than the fourth century, the Greek hymn is one of the earliest to come down to us: in Parks’ setting, written in 2015 for Compline services in Cambridge, it is sung in John Keble’s English translation. The solo soprano takes the plainchant melody, with the remaining choral voices creating an utterly simple but luminous texture by humming wordlessly beneath.
On the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914, Laurence Binyon published in The Times various poems that caught the public mood and were included in his collection The Winnowing Fan at the end of the year. Shortly afterwards it was suggested to Elgar that he set some of them to music. He brought together three of them — The Fourth of August, To Women and For the Fallen – in the choral work The Spirit of England whose first complete performance was given in Birmingham in October 1917.
Two years after the ending of hostilities, a national memorial event was planned to include the unveiling of the Cenotaph in Whitehall and the formal interment of the Unknown Soldier. Elgar was commissioned to provide a piece to be sung to mark the former occasion and turned to his setting of For the Fallen.
Making considerable cuts and changes to both text and music, he produced in With Proud Thanksgiving what is essentially an independent piece that drew on the earlier work. While the unveiling of the Cenotaph went ahead on November 11, 1920, the use of Elgar’s piece in the open air was dropped as impractical.
Finally, the following year With Proud Thanksgiving was used to mark the 50th anniversary of the Royal Albert Hall and incidentally of the Royal Choral Society, which sang the new piece at the venue on May 7, 1921.
Ian Tracey’s We Shall Remember Them adapts material from the corresponding section in With Proud Thanksgiving where the use of the orchestra is in any case so minimal that its absence is scarcely noticed: the result forms a small but touching unaccompanied piece deriving entirely from Elgar’s original.
Best known for his numerous film scores while also prominent in the fields of musicals, jazz and pop, John Cameron is a musician for whom the word ‘wide-ranging’ might appear to be inadequate. Using a text from the Requiem Mass, his finely imagined eight-part choral setting Lux Aeterna is an arrangement of what is surely the best-known moment in the whole of Elgar’s output, Nimrod from the Enigma Variations (1899) — a musical portrait of his friend and editor August Jaeger but one whose associations as a memorial piece are much wider.
The composition of David Bednall’s 2016 Nunc Dimittis came about in an interesting manner. In 1952 Gerald Finzi wrote a Magnificat scored for eight-part choir and organ for a Christmas Vespers service given by the choir of Smith College in Massachusetts: as such, it did not require either a Gloria to follow it or a matching Nunc Dimittis to complete the regular requirement for Anglican Evensong.
Bednall responded to an invitation from the Finzi Trust for pieces that could be used to fill these gaps – though he insists that all he has done is to allow further opportunities for Finzi’s original to be performed. His dedication to his new Nunc Dimittis (with Gloria attached) stresses his ‘utmost love, affection, and respect for Gerald Finzi and his music’ – something equally evident from the sensitive and exceptionally idiomatic nature of his new, perfectly matching creations. The piece was first heard at Gloucester Cathedral in March 2016 and performed later that year at the Three Choirs Festival.
Subsequently Michael Waldron commissioned Bednall to turn the organ part into one for string orchestra, first heard in a concert by the Philharmonia Orchestra in 2018; Bednall has now expanded the result further to match the forces involved in Owain Park’s orchestration of Bainton’s anthem ‘And I saw a New Heaven’.
Over the last few years there has been a revival of interest in the music of Edgar Bainton. He was born in Hackney, East London, in 1880. After studies at the Royal College of Music, notably with Walford Davies and Stanford, he began working at the Newcastle Conservatory of Music, becoming principal in 1912: unfortunately, an unluckily timed visit to the 1914 Bayreuth Festival led to him being placed in a German civilian detention camp until 1918.
After returning to Newcastle, in the early 1930s he travelled extensively, including to Canada, India and Australia: it was an invitation to head the New South Wales Conservatorium in 1934 that saw him move permanently down under. He died in Sydney in 1956.
Published in 1928, his best-known work is the visionary anthem And I saw a new heaven, which sets a text from the Book of Revelation. As composer-in-residence to London Choral Sinfonia, Owain Park was commissioned in 2017 to provide a new orchestration of this transcendent piece to match the forces of another work on the programme: the composer’s own reduced orchestra version of the Duruflé Requiem, requiring three trumpets, timpani, harp, organ, and strings: the result is both imaginative and entirely in sympathy with the original.

George Hall