![]() ![]() The centrepiece of a new album from the choir of Merton College, Oxford, and the Britten Sinfonia is Dyson’s well-known Evening Service in D of 1907, dressed in the orchestral garb bestowed upon it by St Paul’s sub-organist Douglas Hopkins for the 1935 festival. Orchestras began to appear, for which existing works were orchestrated and bespoke ones were written. In the 20th century, the temptation to throw yet more musical resources at the festival – in effect, little more than a colossal church service with a fundraising dinner appended – proved too strong to resist. Merton College Choir (photography: .uk)Ī tradition soon emerged which saw the choir of St Paul’s joined by two other cathedral choirs from elsewhere in England, making for a supersize vocal ensemble (the tradition continues today). The festival got bigger, and it most certainly got louder. In musical terms, the catalyst appears to have been the inauguration of Wren’s new St Paul’s Cathedral in 1697, at which point the festival’s triumphant ‘return’ to its new home came with a determination to fill that church with sound. Not much is known about the music at that 1655 service, though in 1789 Charles Burney noted that in the late 1690s the annual event included Purcell’s Te Deum and Jubilate in D. It was the start of what was to become known as the Festival of the Sons of the Clergy, which a 1956 edition of The Musical Times cites as ‘probably the origin of all music festivals, and in particular of those oratorio festivals which formed such important landmarks in Victorian music-making’. On November 8, 1655, a ‘solemn assembly of sons of ministers’, many of them destitute offspring of clergymen suffering under Cromwell’s regime, gathered at a service for their benefit at the old St Paul’s Cathedral in London. ![]()
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