Celebrating Cambridge

I write fresh from a local event with historical roots far into the past — a concert, part of a year’s-worth of events celebrating Cambridge’s first eight centuries, devoted to exploring the university’s long past and rich present of choral singing.

I write fresh from a local event with historical roots far into the past — a concert, part of a year’s-worth of events celebrating Cambridge’s first eight centuries, devoted to exploring the university’s long past and rich present of choral singing.

The programme had a suitable touch of the academic. Its first half consisted of some mid-16th-century music; either submitted for the degree of Bachelor (Cambridge being the earliest university anywhere to offer such, its first certain date being 1464, way back in the century before); or written by composers who received it; or ‘simply’ some exceedingly complex little pieces demonstrating the kind of brain-twisting puzzle in which the era delighted, more particularly when, accompanied by arcane instructions, such riddling was the best evidence of a composer’s erudition, the chief requirement for an academic reward.

A preliminary lecture introduced this culture of secrecy and speculation: then the concert itself was halted for brief elucidation of the most perplexing of all — an anonymous coded motet, Ave regina cælorum, that had taken the ingenuity of Professor Thurston Dart five years of mental strife to crack. An impressively gaunt, long-limbed if somewhat faceless Mass by Bachelor Christopher Tye was broken into five digestible portions, interspersed with other teasing conundra played on the organ of the University Church, some of them delicate, even charming, in incongruous contrast to their knotty cerebral construction.

This church, Great St Mary’s, had served as official location for all degree-conferring until the Senate House of James Gibbs (he of St Martin-in-the-Fields) was completed in 1730. We all flocked out into soft April drizzle to cross the road and file into the delicious building for a revival — perhaps the first here since that occasion — of the Ode that inaugurated it.

Delicious is the word: the Senate House’s exterior hovers somewhere between prettiness and elegance, with especially inventive swags and capitals in bright white stone that shimmers mysteriously by night, even in drizzle. The interior comes like a cake in three layers (and looks frankly good enough to eat): rich, dark chocolate woodwork, rather heavy and serious as befits the function; then a gallery whose walls set decorative work against a pistachio distemper that doesn’t seem quite the couleur juste (better, if less edible, would be a soft pale blue); before the splendid icing-sugar plasterwork of the ceiling.

If puzzle-attribution continued into the 18th century I’d disguise the composer of the Opening Ode as Giuseppe Ravel. (But this is the age of reason wherein clarity and openness replace superstition and secrecy.) His text is Pope’s Ode in praise of St Cecilia. Dryden’s celebrated piece was a hard act to follow. The 20-year-old Pope, already a smoother technician, puts on a virtuoso performance, and one often suspects mischief beneath the polish. When ‘Love strong as Death’ leads the poet through the underworld, the horrours (sic) are laid on so thick — Dreadful Gleams,/ Dismal Screams,/ Fires that glow,/ Shrieks of Woe,/ Sullen Moans,/ Hollow Groans,/ And Cries of torture’d Ghosts’ — as to suggest the tongue in the 20-year-old cheek.

Our composer does his best with this as, elsewhere, with invocation both caressing and martial; but is no match for his obvious model Handel. There’s a mixture of regret, that Pope’s strongest stanzas, concerning the power of Orpheus and his lyre to ravish Hell and restore Eurydice, were bodily omitted; with relief, that the work stops when it does. This interim close, on a relatively tame and conventional note of festivity conjoining Love and Musick, sacrifices, as well as the Orpheus story, Pope’s genuinely sublime final strophe, hymning the power of sound (‘Musick can soften Pain to Ease/And make Despair and madness please’), to end on a witty and percipient conjunction of the Pagan and the Christian myths: HIS Numbers rais’d a Shade from Hell/ HER’s lift the Soul to Heav’n.

But if Dr Maurice Greene wasn’t up to this, the university’s Chamber Choir and the instrumental forces of its Collegium Musicum were up to him: soloists, chorus and band warbled gently or bravely resonated, with spirit and refinement, in a setting that could not have been more fitting.