• This year’s Armistice Day centenary has seen a spate of new recordings of music written in response to the appalling loss of life suffered in the first world war. Latest in their number is a fine release on the Signum label of music by Ralph Vaughan Williams from the Choir of St John’s College, Cambridge.
Vaughan Williams served as a wagon orderly in the trenches, tasked with recovering shattered bodies from the battlefield, an experience that led him, despite his agnosticism, to explore and set Christian texts in an attempt to find consolation, and to discover what might lie “beyond sense and knowledge”. The Mass in G minor is one fruit of that exploration, an intense, luminous piece that both reimagines 16th-century polyphony and reveals RVW’s emerging harmonic imagination, strongly influenced by his studies with Ravel before the war.
Director Andrew Nethsingha shapes a performance of profound dignity and power, beautifully sung by this always impressive choir. He also programmes several other RVW choral pieces from the same postwar period, concluding with Lord, thou has been our refuge, which moves from darkness into light in an expression of a shared determination to overcome adversity.
For further listening, Stephen Johnson explores the Mass in G minor in an illuminating edition of Radio 3’s Discovering Music, available on BBC iPlayer, and the incomparable Donald Macleod profiles RVW in a Composer of the Week podcast.
• Any recording from the renowned Nash Ensemble is worthy of attention, and their latest, on Hyperion, featuring chamber works by Ernő Dohnányi, does not disappoint. The Hungarian’s music was condemned as backward-looking and anachronistic during his lifetime (1877-1960), but today finds admirers for its inventiveness, clarity of structure and sheer good humour. Here, the Nash combine Dohnányi’s familiar Serenade for string trio in C major with two rewarding, lesser-known works: the String Quartet No 3 in A minor and the Sextet for piano, clarinet, horn and string trio in C major. Both pieces require virtuosic ensemble playing, spiced with a mischievous sense of fun. The Nash have both in abundance in this warm-hearted, generous recording. Give it a try.
