O Clap your Hands: The title of the opening piece in this imaginative programme might just as well have been an exhortation to the audience. Not that one was needed, for there was ample opportunity for applause, energetically taken up after each of the fourteen items in this programme, imaginatively devised by the orchestra’s founder conductor John Lubbock.
The concert was billed as a “Tribute to Vaughan Williams”, whose 150th anniversary fell in October 2022, and it did not disappoint. More than that, music by the eponymous composer was sensitively woven into a tapestry of English music that included works by Frederick Delius (ten years his senior), Peter Warlock (twenty-odd years his junior) and Jeremy Lubbock (the conductor’s late brother).
The joyous opening number was paired with another, contrasting psalm setting by Vaughan Williams, O Taste and See, composed for the late Queen’s coronation in 1953, in which the OSJ Voices gently supported the opening solo soprano line, sung with delicate purity by Hannah Fraser-Mackenzie. By way of introduction, the conductor shared memories of his time as a chorister aged 7 at the Chapel Royal, Windsor Castle, in particular performing when Vaughan Williams himself visited, appearing to the young singer “very old and shrunken”. The audience clearly felt a direct and moving bond with the great composer at that moment.
Between the two choral items came Delius’ seasonally appropriate On hearing the first Cuckoo in spring. The orchestra’s slow, lilting triple time that was to be a feature of the evening was warmly nurtured, stirring quietly into life as the eagerly awaited bird appeared, first discreetly in the clarinet’s chalumeau register as if taking cover among the foliage, before breaking out confidently above the luscious string sound. The tempo adopted for Vaughan Williams’ popular Fantasia on Greensleeves was similarly well-judged, the single double bass proving a most effective anchor throughout. The moment when the solo violin’s counter melody melted from minor to the orchestral major was poised and magical, the solo flute later on captivating, and the harp reassuringly peaceful, after the dramatic central section.
There was a dreamy, vocalising wistfulness from the choir in Delius’ To be sung of a summer night on the water, No.1, the sustained lines drifting away at the end, reminiscent of Wilbye’s Draw on, Sweet Night.
The centrepiece of the programme was Vaughan Williams’ evocative The Lark Ascending. Poppy McGhee, music scholar at Marlborough College, captured beautifully every nuance of the lark’s flight, by turns hesitant or confident, adventurous or reflectively elegiac, effortlessly trilling, fluttering or double-stopping, singing in arioso mode or with a sonorous lower register. Over a rich orchestral sound, she sustained the final farewell cadenza with infinite patience, as the bird soared quietly up, up and away, and left us.
The individual and collective strengths of this chamber orchestra were evident once more in Delius’ Walk to the Paradise Garden. His opera A Village Romeo and Juliet, from which this interlude is taken, derives from Gottfried Keller’s novella of that name, and the rural setting came across convincingly. At times there were strains of Richard Strauss (Metamorphosen), Mahler’s 9th, or even Wagner (Tristan), the orchestra’s mystical tone colours catching the despairingly ecstatic suicide of the protagonists Sali and Vrenchen, the playing responsive as ever to Lubbock’s expansively flowing, generous conducting.
The choir’s pianissimo singing in Lullaby my Jesus, adapted from Peter Warlock’s Capriol Suite, was a highlight of the evening, and their diction no less assured, despite some fleeting uncertainty in the second verse. The orchestra was at its most shimmering in Delius’ affecting Summer night on the river, evoking heavenly peace at dusk.
Perhaps the most enriching surprise of the evening, before the concert ended with an energetic, idiomatic account of Vaughan Williams’ Overture to The Wasps, was Jeremy Lubbock’s Emmanuel. The ample biographical programme note unfortunately told us little about the work itself, for this is a rich, romantic piece for orchestra, vocalising chorus and solo soprano and violin, based on quintessentially English suspensions around the ”cycle of fifths” so familiar from Fly me to the Moon, for example, or Autumn Leaves. At times the music was ineffably sad, at other moments jazzy and rhapsodic. Let us hope that the Orchestra of St John’s brings the prodigious musical talents of the Lubbock brothers, John and Jeremy, to future programmes too.
Surely Vaughan Williams would have approved of this eclectic musical mix performed in his honour. O Clap your Hands? We certainly did.