Christopher Morley speaks to a conductor who had big shoes to fill when he took up the baton at the City of Birmingham Choir.
Saturday sees one of Birmingham’s most illustrious musical institutions celebrating its 90th anniversary, when the City of Birmingham Choir performs an all-Czech concert at Symphony Hall.
The programme itself is typical of the choir’s enterprising approach, never content just to churn out the traditional choral pot-boilers, but anxious to explore every byway of the repertoire.
So in 1922, one year after its founding, it gave Vaughan Williams’ recently-composed Mass in G minor its first airing, and, a couple of years later, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas; music from both ends of the historical spectrum, and with established choral masterpieces always regularly appearing along the way.
Such was the reputation of the City Choir that many of its concerts were relayed live by the BBC, until London-instigated cuts brought an end to such proceedings; it tackled contemporary music with relish and zeal (and still does); and it established a long-term relationship with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra which has survived the CBSO’s formation of its own chorus in 1973, as Saturday’s concert testifies, as will the regular annual Advent performances of Handel’s Messiah next month.
Part of the choir’s success has been the shrewdness it has had in appointing gifted conductors.
For a major part of its early years the Birmingham City organist G.D. Cunningham was at the helm, moulding and consolidating the strengths of his chorus.
George Weldon, principal conductor of the CBSO, took over for a while, and then the first of a series of inspired appointments was made.
David Willcocks, organist and choirmaster at Worcester Cathedral (succeeding the redoubtable Ivor Atkins, who had presided at the loft there for over half a century) brought tremendously refreshing repertoire to the CBC, beginning with the Verdi Requiem for his opening concert on November, 21, 1950.
Poignantly, his final concert on June 4, 1957, was Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius.
Meredith Davies followed, one of the highlights of his conductorship being the Birmingham premiere in 1963 of Britten’s War Requiem, whose first performance he had conducted a year earlier in Coventry Cathedral alongside the composer.
Then came a conductor who remained nearly 40 years with the City of Birmingham Choir and who raised it to standards of aspiration and achievement which would be an impossibly hard act to follow.
Christopher Robinson, originally, again, from Worcester Cathedral, and later based at St George’s Chapel Windsor, smilingly drilled his choristers into such huge late 20th-century masterpieces as Messiaen’s La Transfiguration de Notre-Seigneur Jesus-Christ and Tippett’s The Mask of Time.
Robinson would be a hard act to follow.
How did Adrian Lucas (also from Worcester Cathedral), who succeeded him in 2002, feel about stepping into his shoes?
