This morning, easily the choir’s favorite part of the music we took over to Oxford this summer – Charles Villiers Stanford’s setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis texts which we sang for Evensong at Christ Church in that magical city. This pair of settings marked a major step forward in Stanford’s setting of the morning and evening canticles. As a composer, he fully assimilated Brahms’s symphonic intellectualism and looked to adapt this compositional approach to the setting of familiar canticle texts. In bringing an instrumental orientation to the music of the Anglican liturgy, Stanford challenged the accepted norm of ‘choral’ primacy where emphasis on the words, the clarity of their delivery, meaning, and most of all their comprehension was paramount.
This is not to say that Stanford (any more than his hero Brahms) ignored the textual dimension, but other issues, such as the sense of musical and structural cohesion, came to warrant equal consideration – thus the Evensong service became a quasi-symphonic experience as was the case with most of the Romantic century. To add weight to this change of emphasis, the organ was emancipated from its customary accompaniment role, assuming a quasi-orchestral character; here it is equal in importance to the voices in the musical argument. More than anything, Stanford’s gift for flowing Romantic melody is on full display here, whether in the passionately upsurging line on “world without end” in the Magnificat, or the gorgeous tune that opens the Nunc dimittis for tenors and basses alone. The music closes with a quotation of the famous Dresden Amen, bringing the work to a glowing close.
– Justin Smith