United Kingdom 2025 Three Choirs Festival [1] – Smyth, Dvořák, Mathias: Eleanor Dennis (soprano), James Oxley (tenor), Malachy Frame (baritone), Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Hereford Cathedral Choristers, Philharmonia Orchestra / Geraint Bowen (conductor). Hereford Cathedral, 26.7.2025. (JQ)
Dame Ethel Smyth – Overture to The Wreckers
Dvořák – Te Deum, Op 103
William Mathias – This Worlde’s Joie, Op 67
For the first major evening concert of the 2025 Festival, Geraint Bowen put together an attractive and colourful programme.
Proceedings opened with music by Dame Ethel Smyth (1858-1944) in the shape of the overture to her three-act Opera, The Wreckers (1902-04). The opera enjoyed some initial success – it was, for example, the first opera by a female composer to be staged at New York’s Metropolitan Opera – but after the Second World War it fell into complete neglect until it was revived at the 1994 BBC Proms to mark the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death. That performance, conducted by Odaline de la Martinez, was subsequently issued on CD; it is still available and is worth investigating (Retrospect Opera RO004). I read in the booklet accompanying the recording that in recent years there have been one or two performances of the opera in the wake of that Prom; however, you are more likely to encounter the overture as a standalone concert item, as was the case tonight. The overture is an effective and entertaining piece. I admired the lively approach of Bowen and the Philharmonia to several sections of the piece but what particularly stuck in my mind was the warmth with which the overture’s lyrical ‘big tune’ – a very good tune – was delivered. This was a strong start to the evening.
Next, we heard Dvořák’s setting of the Te Deum. This was written in 1892, just as the composer was about to set off for his period of living and working in the USA; indeed, the premiere was given, under the composer’s baton, in Carnegie Hall, New York. It is quite a compact setting of the ancient Latin hymn, lasting about twenty minutes. In his programme note, Richard Bratby summed it up well as ‘an exuberant choral symphony in four linked movements’. It is worth adding, I think, that the piece is a quintessential example of Dvořák’s music, both in terms of the melodic invention and the harmonic language. Its performance certainly got off to an exuberant start, though in the resonant acoustic the sound of the full forces of the Festival Chorus and the Philharmonia was somewhat congested, albeit stirring. The performance really came into its own in the calmer, more lyrical stretches of the work. In these episodes the soloists, Eleanor Dennis and Malachy Frame made fine contributions, and Geraint Bowen shaped the music with proper affection. I also liked the neat, well-articulated singing and playing in the ‘Aeterna fac’ section, which is, in effect, the work’s scherzo. Richard Bratby asserted that the end of the work should ‘surely set the angels themselves dancing for sheer joy’. Quite whether there was dancing in Heaven on this occasion I don’t know, but Bowen, his singers and players definitely brought Dvořák’s Te Deum to a rousing, jubilant conclusion.
William Mathias (1934-1992) wrote his cantata This Worlde’s Joie for the 1971 Fishguard Festival but the premiere, which the composer conducted, was delayed until 1974. I think I am right in saying that the composer wrote the three solo parts specifically for three voices, one of which was the distinguished Welsh tenor, Kenneth Bowen (the others were soprano Janet Price and baritone Michael Rippon). It is very appropriate, therefore, that Geraint Bowen should have chosen the work for this Three Choirs Festival concert since his father was so identified with it. In 1976, the three singers for whom Mathias conceived the solo roles made a recording of the cantata, conducted by Sir David Willcocks, for EMI; it has been reissued by Lyrita (review here). I remember buying the recording on LP when it first came out and later, I upgraded to the Lyrita CD. With one recent exception, of which more in a moment, I rather suspect that This Worlde’s Joie has not received too many performances over the years but, in fact, I attended one in April 1978 when I was still living in Yorkshire. On that occasion the work was sung by the Bradford Festival Choral Society, which is one of the oldest established choral societies in the UK; they were founded as long ago as 1856. Their very enterprising programme on that occasion in 1978 also included another recent work, John Rutter’s The Falcon (1969) and I remember that both Mathias and Rutter were present. Willcocks, who conducted the BFCS between 1956 and 1974, was invited back for this concert and he brought with him the three aforementioned soloists. The BCFS archivist kindly sent me a copy of the programme recently and when I revisited it, I was reminded that BBC Radio 3 broadcast the concert live. I also noted that the anonymous programme note included the following comments: ‘This Worlde’s Joie is meant to be enjoyed by both listeners and performers … It is a work which makes no separation between secular and sacred. It is, throughout, an Act of Celebration’. I was delighted to have the opportunity to experience the work in concert again.
I said that there was had been at least one recent performance of This Worlde’s Joie. I discovered that in March 2024, Geraint Bowen conducted a performance with the Hereford Choral Society in which the three soloists we heard tonight were involved. I wonder if the performance commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the work’s premiere; whether or not that was the case, it was pragmatic of Bowen to lead a performance some fifteen months prior to tonight’s. I imagine that a good number of Hereford Choral Society members are involved in this year’s Festival Chorus; the preparatory work in early 2024 will have paid dividends, as will the experience of having performed this sometimes tricky music in the cathedral’s generous acoustic. To be honest, in advance of this performance I was concerned that the resonant acoustic might blunt the impact of music that is often rhythmically sharp-edged, but such was not the case. Furthermore, in the loud passages Mathias’s bright orchestration emerged more clearly than was the case in tutti passages in the Dvořák. Mathias did not stint himself when it came to orchestrating the cantata; he wrote for a pretty full complement of woodwind and brass as well as a large contingent of percussionists – I counted five players plus a timpanist. Pleasingly, though, the orchestra almost never overpowered the singers; that is no mean feat in this acoustic.
The libretto for This Worlde’s Joie, compiled by Mathias himself, I believe, is an anthology of British sacred and secular texts from the medieval and Tudor periods; the work is sung in English. The score is divided into four parts; each one addresses a season of the year, starting with Spring and progressing in chronological order. Furthermore, each season corresponds to a stage in what I suppose would nowadays be described as one’s ‘life journey’(!) So, we have Spring (Youth); Summer (Maturity); Autumn (Decline); and Winter (Death); then the work comes full circle at the end ‘leading to a transfigured Spring and re-birth’. Three soloists are involved together with SATB chorus and a children’s choir; it is not until the very of the work, though, that all the forces are brought together. I have read a number of comments over the years that the work calls to mind Britten’s Spring Symphony (1949); I agree with that, but it is worth noting that in his booklet note accompanying the Willcocks recording Geraint Lewis also references Tippett’s The Midsummer Marriage (1955).
Tonight’s performance was excellent: I thought the Festival Chorus rose to the occasion with singing which was robust when required but also delicate in places. Above all, they sang with enthusiasm and commitment. My seat was towards the rear of the nave but even though I didn’t follow the text line by line the choir’s clarity of diction enabled me to discern the words. That was true also of the boy and girl choristers of Hereford Cathedral. The children’s choir has several important interventions in the work – just one of several instances of indebtedness to Britten – and these young singers impressed consistently. They sang clearly and confidently with a fresh, attractive timbre.
The soloists all have important contributions to make. James Oxley offered clarity and rhythmic agility. In his important solo near the start of Part III (‘The other day/I hear a maid/Right piteously complain’) the plangency of his voice was well suited to the melancholy music. However, the tonal quality of his voice has become somewhat narrow; I would have liked to experience a more open-throated ring and, with it, a wider range of expression. I don’t think I have heard baritone Malachy Frame before, he is a good singer, who offered firm tone and clarity of diction. The baritone has a major solo at the end of Part II (‘In a time of a Summer’s day’). Here, the soloist depicts a manly hunter who experiences, to his cost, the dangers of the chase. I thought Frame didn’t really put the solo across with sufficient bite, though in fairness Mathias doesn’t make it easy for his soloist, requiring him to articulate a lot of words and notes at pace against a busy orchestral background. I also felt that Frame was a bit too serious in his duet with the soprano soloist in Part I (‘I pray you, come and kiss me’). On the other hand, he was very well suited to the dark music of ‘Winter wakeneth all my care’ at the start of Part IV; here, he got the intensity just right. I very much enjoyed Eleanor Dennis’s contributions. In the duet ‘I pray you, come and kiss me’ she entered right into the spirit of the words and music, not just in the way she sang, but also through facial expressions; she conveyed mischief and coyness in a fashion which the audience evidently enjoyed. I also found much to admire in the sensitivity and expressiveness that she brought to melancholy solos later in the work (‘Ah, what is love?’ in Part II, and ‘I loved a childe of this country’ in Part III).
I thought Geraint Bowen conducted the performance very well indeed. In this fifty-minute score Mathias set a large number of texts – some twenty, if I have counted correctly; each of these texts is set to different music and each such setting is quite short. Therefore, it must be a challenge to bring everything together into a coherent whole. Bowen did so convincingly. He obtained excellent, incisive playing from the Philharmonia, who brought the vivid and colourful orchestration vividly to life. He supported his soloists well and encouraged his choirs to give of their best. At the end of the work, Mathias unites all the forces for the only time in the score for a rousing setting of ‘Adam lay i-bounden’. Bowen encouraged all the performers to make these closing pages a resounding celebration of re-birth. The way this ending was achieved gave us a final reminder of the accuracy of that comment all those years ago in the Bradford programme note that This Worlde’s Joie is, above all, ‘an Act of Celebration’. This was a performance in which Geraint Bowen and the Three Choirs Festival did William Mathias proud.
John Quinn
Featured Image: Geraint Bowen conducts the Three Choirs Festival Chorus, Philharmonia Orchestra, tenor James Oxley, soprano Eleanor Dennis and baritone Malachy Frame © Dale Hodgetts