Charles Wood - St.Mark Passion

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What would Stainer have thought? 7 Feb 2006

In the closed world of choral singing few names carry more weight, awe and mystique than that of Charles Wood. At turns rapturous, at turns harrowing, his music penetrates deeper than almost any other English composer, save Bainton, Murrill and Stanford. How sad, then, that his greatest work, the summation of his output and crown up on his laurels, should be so little known and underrated.

For this, his setting of the Passion according to St Mark, leads us from the intimacy of the Last Supper through to the titanic collision of earth and heaven upon the hill at Calvary, without a city wall. Where Bach cluttered his music with counterpoint and rhetoric, Wood eschews all bombast and leaves great stretches of emptiness where almost nothing happens.

And only an English choir could bring life to such music as this. Few understand the depths the English soul can sound, nor fathom that lucidity of feeling which sons of our little plot possess. This choir does well: we want no screeching sopranos to caterwaul the bitter road to perdition, but rather limpid and delicate must they sing. So sing they here.

As Ordinary Time with quotidien swiftness gives way to Lent, what better way to reflect on salvation, Englishness, and tea?