United States Stainer, The Crucifixion: Sean Fallen (tenor), Nathaniel Sullivan (baritone), Alistair Reid (organist), Chancel Choir / Raymond Nagem (conductor). The Brick Presbyterian Church, New York, 18.4.2025. (RP)

Sir John Stainer had been dead for more than twenty years when his most enduring work, The Crucifixion, was first performed at The Brick Presbyterian Church on Good Friday in 1924. It began an annual tradition that has now spanned over a century, and it was maintained this year with the church’s Minister of Music, Raymond Nagem, leading a moving performance of the perennial favorite.
Born in 1840, Stainer was a preeminent figure in Victorian England as an organist, composer and Oxford professor. The son of a schoolmaster, Stainer was a boy chorister at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, where he was appointed organist in 1872. He suffered vision problems his entire life, and concern over his failing eyesight prompted him to relinquish his post in 1888. He died suddenly of a heart attack at sixty on Palm Sunday in 1901 while vacationing in Italy with his wife.
Stainer was inspired to compose The Crucifixion by Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which he led in its first performance at St Paul’s during Holy Week in 1873. He composed The Crucifixion for Marylebone Parish Church, where William Hodge, his pupil, served as organist and choirmaster. Stainer conducted the first performances on 24 February 1887 at the church, and it has been heard there annually ever since.
The Crucifixion is scored for tenor and baritone soloists, chorus and organ. Unlike Bach, Stainer did not assign the entire narrative to a single singer but divided it between the two soloists. The Rev William Sparrow-Simpson, Stainer’s colleague at St Paul’s, compiled the libretto, drawing on the Gospel accounts for the narrative elements of the story and writing the texts of the choruses, arias and hymns himself. Some contemporary critics excoriated both the text and the music, but The Crucifixion found its audience among those for whom it was intended.
RCA Victor’s 1930 recording – which featured Metropolitan Opera stars tenor Richard Crooks and baritone Lawrence Tibbett, the Trinity Church Choir and Mark Andrews at the organ – was a sign of its popularity in America in the first half of the twentieth century. Other recordings have followed, most from Great Britain. Barry Rose, best known for directing the music at the 1981 wedding of Charles, Prince of Wales and Diana, Princess of Wales at St Paul’s Cathedral, has long championed the work, recording it with Guildford Cathedral Choir in 1968.

At The Brick Church, The Crucifixion is presented not as a concert but as part of its traditional Good Friday service. The cantata is uninterrupted, and bookended by prayers, two hymns and organ works. The Brick Church’s excellent Chancel Choir combines professional singers and top-notch volunteer choristers. Nagem, who conducted the performance, received his education at Yale University and The Juilliard School. In addition to his duties at The Brick Church, he is on the organ faculty at Manhattan School of Music. Excellence, not amateurism, is the hallmark at The Brick Church.
The chorus added drama throughout, beginning with ‘The Agony’, which tells of Jesus praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, and ‘The Appeal of the Crucified’ with its echoes of Mendelssohn’s choral style. The twenty singers led the five congregational hymns with solid, forthright singing. ‘God so loved the world’, the work’s most well-known piece, was enhanced by the ethereal sound of the sopranos, perfect intonation and an air of total repose.
Sean Fallen’s lyric tenor was well-suited to the emotion-laden ‘Processional to Calvary’, and robust enough to do full justice to the triumphant ‘The Majesty of the Divine Humiliation’. Baritone Nathaniel Sullivan sang superbly throughout. He and Fallen matched each other in the beauty of their head voices in the duet ‘So though liftest Thy divine petition’. Sullivan enriched every passage he sang, from the pathos of ‘The Agony’ to the triumph of ‘And Moses lifted up the serpent into the wilderness’, with the evenness of his voice, attention to text and acute sensitivity to the drama.
Stainer’s writing for the organ is a wonderful showcase of Victorian color and sentimentality; Alistair Reid, Assisting Organist at The Brick Church, mined the score for all of its worth in terms of color, especially in his choice of solo stops, which Stainer calls for throughout the work. Reid added rhythmic vitality at every opportunity, such as his jaunty march-like accompaniment to ‘Processional to Calvary’. The sepulchral rumblings from Reid at the organ lent a sense of terror to Sullivan’s pronouncement that darkness covered the earth as Jesus hung on the cross.
Stainer’s old-fashioned Lenten chestnut may not be timeless, but it still resonates with people worldwide in the twenty-first century. With such a thoughtful, high-caliber performance, Nagem and his forces at The Brick Church made it clear why that is so.
Rick Perdian