Ah, the difficult second album. There are few pieces of music for Christmas that have not already been recorded to death. To make for a more interesting listen, we have broadened the scope a little, spanning the liturgy from the beginning of Advent to the feasts of The Holy Name of Jesus (3 January) and Epiphany (6 January). A handful of classics and some pieces which are of particular importance to our family are punctuated by a pinch of lesser known plainchant and some more generic texts, all with a healthily Catholic focus on the Virgin Mary.

To satisfy my obsession with rediscovering lost treasures, we have also managed to include several premiere recordings; first among these is the album’s Mass setting centrepiece: Palestrina was mightily prolific and though he can hardly be called obscure, the majority of his music remains difficult to find in performing editions and unrecorded. Given his importance, during lockdown I began to try to rectify this, using my Polyphony Database as a vehicle to collate and catalogue sources, and upload editions as I churned through them.

I started with his offertories and masses for 5 voices so that The Davey Consort (featuring several Bevan cousins) would have something interesting to sing of a Sunday morning. The Consort hopes to record the complete offertories at some point—to those in the know, they are unanimously regarded to be his greatest compositions. Of his 104+ mass settings, about two thirds have been recorded, unfortunately for us, including all the Christmas themed ones (Hodie Christus natus est, Alma redemptoris, O magnum mysterium and Dies sanctificatus).

The remainder comprise some absolute masterpieces, of which the Missa sine nomine is undoubtedly one. It is scored for SAATB and is one of 5 canon masses he wrote (the others being Sacerdotes Domini, Repleatur os meum, Ad caenam agni providi and Ad fugam) i.e. two of the voice parts sing the same music a few beats and pitches apart, (in this case getting further away from each other as the Mass progresses) with each of the 5 voices getting a chance to lead and follow the canon thus:

Kyrie 1: Quintus followed by Cantus a 5th higher and 1 beat later

Christe: Quintus followed by Cantus a 4th higher and 2 beats later

Kyrie 2: Cantus followed by Tenor an octave lower and 3 beats later

Gloria: Quintus followed by Tenor a tone lower and 4 beats later

Qui tollis: Tenor followed by Quintus a tone higher and 5 beats later

Credo: Bassus followed by Tenor a third higher and 6 beats later

Et in spiritum: Tenor followed by Bassus a third lower and 7 beats later

Sanctus: Altus followed by Cantus a sixth higher and 8 beats later

Osanna: Cantus followed by Quintus a sixth lower and 9 beats later

Agnus Dei 1: Cantus followed by Tenor a seventh lower and 10 beats later

Agnus Dei 2: Tenor followed by Cantus a seventh higher and 11 beats later

With the exception of the Crucifixus and Benedictus quartets, the whole mass follows this canonic structure rigidly, and yet this is never obvious to the casual listener—a testament to Palestrina’s skill. On top of hiding the mechanism, he also manages to create strikingly beautiful music; the Et incarnatus est section and last Agnus Dei are particular highlights, but gloriously shaped melodies and daring suspensions are littered throughout—this is top drawer Palestrina.

The placing of the canonic voices is also quite unconventional, at least for large-scale works like this: the resolutio voice often enters on an offbeat resulting in some peculiar word stresses and beginnings and ends of phrases, almost as if Palestrina were challenging himself to a contrapuntal brainteaser. He uses this potential difficulty to his advantage, weaving the other voices around to make the same contours serve different harmonic functions a few bars apart from each other. His genius is to make these offset lines very natural to sing, while the pulse becomes increasingly ambiguous, resulting in more opportunity for expressive word setting.

The Mass is published in one of the many posthumous compilations (Missarum … liber nonus, Venice: Scotto, 1599) and no earlier manuscript sources have yet surfaced, so it’s difficult to know when in Palestrina’s career it was written, but the effortless fluency of the counterpoint suggests a late work. Readers will be pleased to know that we spent much of our downtime between recording sessions completing cryptic crosswords in his honour (with limited success).

Also recorded here for the first time is Imogen Holst’s setting of The Virgin unspotted for 3 upper voices. Sophie had the idea of asking the Red House in Aldeburgh—home to Benjamin Britten and also of his musical archive—to find out whether there was any unrecorded music by her lurking in their library. Holst was a close friend and collaborator of Britten’s, working as his copyist while also composing herself, but much of her music is unknown still. Sure enough, they dug out a couple of carols, one of which was perfect for us.

David Bevan Snr’s Lute-book Lullaby, originally written for the men of St John’s Cambridge, has been recorded by them a fourth lower. This was another of his compositions we sang at Holy Redeemer (at the higher pitch), and a reasonable example of his modern style (as opposed to his better known pastiche style exemplified by the fauxbordon Magnificat on our first album). He too was a lover of canons, especially when combined with grating bitonality!

Other regular Christmas crackers from the festive shelf at Holy Redeemer include the barnstorming advent motet Rorate caeli by Slovenian composer Jacob Handl aka Gallus—suspiciously under-recorded considering its popularity among church singers the world over, Gloria in excelsis Deo by Thomas Weelkes—a contrapuntal tour de force and family party piece (with one of the top 5 Amens in the repertoire for my money), and the eccentric Peter Warlock’s famous Benedicamus Domino—everyone’s favourite 2-minute carol service scream.

The liner notes for disc 1 had mostly gone to press before auntie Rachel died in 2022, but she was just as big an influence on us as her brother David. For years she ran the music for Christmas and Easter at Downside Abbey, and her choir for these occasions normally featured a cohort of Bevan cousins. Victoria’s O magnum mysterium, her favourite motet, was always on the menu at Christmas time, as was John Joubert’s There is no rose, both of which perfectly suited her laserbeam pure soprano voice, all washed down with a home-made mince pie and a swig from her flask of ferociously boozy mulled wine.

Extra Christmas magic is scattered across the album in the form of some favourite carols: the current generation’s carol of choice is undoubtedly Harold Darke’s setting of Christina Rossetti’s poem In the bleak mid-winter, but this is impossible to perform without organ accompaniment, which wasn’t possible this time round. I therefore transplanted the organ part into SATB for our recording with kind permission from Stainer & Bell. We also include Stanley Vann’s There is a flower, recommended by David Bevan Jnr who had encountered it during his day job at Wells Cathedral—as far as we’re aware, there is no commercial recording of this available until now, which is a surprise as it has all the hallmarks of a simple timeless classic.

It is such a treat for us cousins to spend a few days together, but increasingly difficult to find the time with our young families and busy day jobs (e.g. you might have noticed Edward’s absence from this recording), but normally everyone is at home for Christmas. At some point in the evening in every Bevan household, Harmony at Parsonage Farm (a documentary made by HTV in the 1970s about the original Bevan Family Choir and available to view on YouTube!) is wheeled out as an excuse to reminisce and embarrass that generation. A performance of The holly and the ivy round the fire is the opening scene, so we thought it only fitting to record our own rendition.

Our great-great-grandfather H E J Bevan gave John Ireland his first organist job while rector of Holy Trinity Sloane Street, and the musician followed him down the road to St Luke’s a few years later. It was at St Luke’s in 1913 that he conceived The Holy Boy, originally as a solo piano piece but arranged for various different ensembles throughout his career. Round the corner at that time, another towering figure in 20th-century English church music, Herbert Howells, had just started studying at the Royal College of Music. Among his earliest works is Here is the little door, a setting of a poem by Frances Chesterton, wife of the apologist Gilbert Keith (to whom Howells dedicated his carol) and the cause of his conversion to Catholicism. The Nativity was a particular fascination of hers owing to her inability to have children of her own, and in these perfectly crafted verses she observes it through the eyes of the baby Jesus’s first visitors. Musically, it is a masterclass in understated word painting, managing to capture both the simplicity of the tableau and the mystery of its deeper meaning.

Finally we present Jesu, dulcis memoria, a hymn proper to the feast of The Holy Name of Jesus, set by French composer Pierre Villette. He was a devout Catholic like his teacher Maurice Duruflé, and shared his lack of interest in the fashionable avant-garde school of French composition. This and lifelong chronic illness meant he was neither particularly celebrated during his lifetime nor prolific. The few choral pieces he left are not nearly as well known as they ought to be, each a carefully considered gem combining interesting melodies and deliciously slushy impressionistic harmony while being easy enough for amateurs to put together.

Francis Bevan © 2024

The news came through on our way back from recording our first album at the beautiful Buckland House in Devon. We’d spent a blissful four days catching up, playing cricket, boating on the lake, eating the delicious food cooked by our dear uncle Rupert and then hurrying off to the adjacent church in the grounds of the house to sing together and work hard under the watchful eye/baton of Graham Ross to make a record of this moment in our family history. We felt it had all gone rather well. Surprisingly well. The proof came when Mary texted us all while we were making that long, sad journey home to say that Signum had rung, and wanted to know if we’d be up for making a second album the following year? Certainly in my car we were all shrieking with joy. We couldn’t believe it! We were being given the chance to do it all again next Summer and now we had that to look forward to!

There had been a few naysayers when we had the idea of recording our first album. We’d never be able to get everyone together for the time needed to make a recording. We’d fight amongst ourselves about the sound we made. There were too many amateurs juxtaposed with professional opera singers. We’d all drink too much and wouldn’t be able to sing. It was bound to fail. They were wrong. Somehow the opposite happened. We were all so happy to be together at this beautiful house and everyone wanted to work hard and our voices seemed to slot together almost effortlessly. The thing is, we really wanted it to work and as a result, it did.

And so, with delight we all tripped along to a different but equally wonderful setting in Gloucestershire last Summer to do it all again. This time it was a Christmas album but recorded in the midst of a balmy Summer! We donned Christmas hats ordered by a keen family member and hung decorations from the rafters. Why Christmas? Well, what says family more than Christmastide? A time when we all get together and sing carols at church and around the dinner table. It was the obvious path to take. Francis put together a programme of family favourites mixed with a sprinkling of a few lesser-known or previously unrecorded gems and we set to work trying to perfect our particular sound and create something that we and our family could all be proud of. We hope that you glean from this recording the joy that we as a family felt singing this beautiful music in a very special atmosphere.

Sophie Bevan © 2024