The Queen’s state funeral was a factor of musical contrasts. Exterior within the streets have been the skirl of bagpipes, tolling bells, massed bands, tramping toes and solemn marches by Beethoven, Chopin and Mendelssohn, as immense processions slowly wound their means via London. Inside Westminster Abbey, the pomp was tempered by reflection on an extended life and reign, interwoven with British choral music from the seventeenth century to the current day, sung by the choirs of Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, St James Palace, performed by the Abbey’s director of music, James O’Donnell.
The continuity of custom predictably hung heavy over the occasion. The content material of the haunting Sentences, sung because the coffin was introduced into the Abbey, has remained unchanged for royal and state funerals because the 18th century; their composer was William Croft, then the Abbey’s organist, although in deference to his nice predecessor, Henry Purcell, Croft additionally retained the latter’s Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets and techniques of our Hearts, written for the funeral of Mary II in 1695.
Thereafter the anthems, psalms, hymns and organ music are a matter of selection. The hymns included The Lord’s My Shepherd, I’ll Not Need, a favorite of the Queen and sung at her wedding ceremony, whereas Vaughan Williams’s O Style and See was written for her coronation. One of many anthems, in the meantime My Soul There Is a Nation, setting poetry by Henry Vaughan, was taken from Songs of Farewell by Hubert Parry, a favorite composer of the King. The organ music earlier than the service, performed by Peter Holder and Matthew Jorysz, paid tribute to former Masters of the Kings or Queen’s Music, together with Elgar, Malcolm Williamson and Peter Maxwell Davies, whereas Bach’s Fantasia in C Minor, at a little bit of a tangent from the remainder of all of it, shaped the recessional voluntary.
There was additionally, nevertheless, new music: a setting of a part of Psalm 42, Like because the Hart Desireth the Water-brooks, by Judith Weir, present Grasp of the King’s Music; and the anthem Who Shall Separate Us From the Love of Christ by James MacMillan. Weir’s psalm is astonishingly lovely, as slowly shifting chords and harmonies recommend the soul’s eager for God within the contemplation of eternity. MacMillan’s composition is in some respects extra unstable, his anthem opening with higher voices hovering over a sustained bass drone, earlier than the music escalates in the direction of a sequence of ecstatic alleluias and involves relaxation on a quiet Amen. Each items need to be heard past their instant context.
You couldn’t, after all, fault how any of it was finished. Sacred music typically sounds its greatest sung by choirs who carry out it in an ecclesiastical setting all through the course of the liturgical yr. The Sentences have been touching (it’s exhausting to not be moved by the Purcell), the anthems splendidly centered and managed. An excessive amount of of the organ music initially was both obscured by TV commentary or vanished altogether as cameras minimize away, although Holder’s enjoying of the Bach on the shut was magnificently imposing and sombre.
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