Here is a review written for the Herbert Howells Society Newsletter.
Being asked to speak about Hymnus Paradisi for the Hereford Three Choirs Festival in 2025 forced me to spend a lot of time thinking about Hymnus. I’ve been conscious of it for around twenty years, but there’s nothing like spending several months with the score on your desk for repeated listing. And when I say repeated, I mean around 80 times, covering a range of live and studio recordings, with the printed score and the manuscripts in the Royal College of Music archive. I’d always been aware that some regarded it as Howells’ masterpiece, and yet I’d often struggled to understand it and comprehend how the six separate movements made sense as an overall work. I couldn’t see the wood for the trees.
A period of intense study helped me make connections that I’d never considered before, and I’ve come to appreciate it as one of the most profound statements on grief in music history. Members can listen to the lecture on YouTube (see https://youtu.be/PHk8zqV7eOw). At its heart is ‘the transfiguration of Michael into light and sound’, which is a remarkable statement for any work of art. Every time I listen, I hear new elements and gain a deeper appreciation of how the composer does this. I’ve also come to rethink my ideas on why he started writing, responding initially to the deaths of Elgar and Holst, rather than Michael’s death specifically.
Of course, with Hymnus, we often gain perspectives from listening to its parent work, the Requiem. As with many of Howells’ works, there are multiple manuscripts in various states of completion, and it could be argued that Howells rarely considered a work ‘finished’. As Hilary Macnamara loved to remind me, ‘he’d be changing it now, if he had the chance’. It took over a decade to persuade Howells to release Hymnus, and he had no memory of the Requiem when it was released late in life; it’s questionable as to whether it would have ever been released without intense pressure from David Willcocks.
When Howells finally conceded to Herbert Sumsion and Gerald Finzi, and agreed to the first performance of Hymnus, it was far from ‘complete’, and he undertook considerable work, particularly on the orchestration, which was highly specialised and ‘inspired’ by the specific context of its performance in Gloucester Cathedral. The 2025 performance in Hereford Cathedral demonstrated some of the challenges that the ‘Gloucester’ score poses today (for example, now the Three Choirs Chorus is around a third of the size). There are constant questions of dynamics, balance and tempo. For those planning performances, an earlier question is often one of cost. A large symphony orchestra is expensive (and needs a large venue too). It was with this in mind that Iain Farrington arranged Hymnus in 2018, ‘for around 20-30 players’ which ‘allows performances in smaller venues with modest-sized choirs’. The arrangement is scored for soprano and tenor soloists, choir, harp, organ, timpani, and strings (minimum 5,4,3,3,2).
I’m sure there are those for whom even the thought of an arrangement is a form of sacrilege, but the more I study Howells’ desire to tailor his scores to specific performing forces, the more I’m convinced that we need to be open-minded. Ultimately, we need to experience these works in the flesh to gauge the success (or lack thereof). This arrangement facilitates more live performances, and if there’s anything I’ve learnt from listening to recordings again and again, it is that the live experience of this work has a very different effect from the domestic experience.
On Thursday 26th February, the BBC Singers performed Hymnus Paradisi at Milton Court Concert Hall in London, under their Chief Conductor, Sofi Jeannin. The concert was also broadcast live on Radio 3 ‘In Concert’. The hall, part of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, seats around 600, with a reasonably dry acoustic profile, which felt very different to all of the Hymnus and Requiem performances that I’ve attended before. However, this new secular context felt part of the excitement. This is a very complex score, and I was looking forward to considering it afresh, with just 18 singers and the intensity of a chamber scoring. Sofi Jeannin’s physical gestures were exceptionally focused, and this brought remarkable clarity from the singers who covered a notably large dynamic range.
This intense form of listening was also something that resulted from the programming. So often, Howells is programmed in some sort of all British/English line-up. The BBC programme acted as an important challenge to this sort of default thinking, with an exciting first half of James Macmillan, Caroline Shaw, Judith Weir and Einojuhani Rautavaara. All of the works covered similar topics with diverse styles and responses; this sort of programming demands so much more from the listener, as the imagination responds to their dynamic challenges.
In the context of some of the finest contemporary scores, Howells’ music seemed equally alive and resonant. This was partly due to the sheer level of detail that we could hear. A very different experience to hearing it washing round a mighty cathedral, but I couldn’t help thinking that Howells would have been equally blown away by a fully professional performance of such accuracy. Yes, Hymnus was first performed in Gloucester, but when he was writing most of it, there was no performance in mind, and most choruses would place it at the ‘technically difficult’ end of the spectrum.
The BBC Singers performed with their usual high standards, with two of their number, Emma Tring and Albert Soriano, taking the solo roles. Soriano stood in at the last minute, receiving the score in the same week. Nevertheless, the unity of spirit was remarkable, and they achieved an overall directness that was truly profound. Rather like Howells and Gurney after hearing the ‘Tallis’ Fantasia in 1910, I left Milton Court almost speechless. Farrington’s arrangement is intensely musical and sympathetic, enabling a journey into the heart of Howells as I’ve come to know him.
In subsequent weeks, I returned to the online recording through BBC Sounds. At the time, I was reeling from my own son’s diagnosis with cancer, and Howells’ score, which originated in such pain and suffering, spoke louder than ever. The transformation that takes place from the first to the second parts of Hymnus Paradisi is one of such remarkable hope. That’s what I’d missed for years. My lecture spoke of how Michael is present within the score, through a theology of ‘immanence’ — the sacred is present within. This quality contrasts with the ‘transcendence’ of composers such as Parry and Vaughan Williams (instead looking to worlds beyond), or more moral perspectives, such as the ‘warning’ of Britten’s War Requiem or Tippett’s A Child of Our Time. In subsequent works, Missa Sabrinensis and the Stabat Mater, Howells continued that exploration of immanence, giving us a highly personalised perspective on suffering, which always holds onto that sense of beauty and hope which is close at hand.
Dr Jonathan Clinch 