Ireland: Church Music – Lincoln Cathedral Choir

There is a particular sound an English parish choir makes on a good day — boys’ voices thinned by cold stone, altos slightly under pitch, everything held together by an organist who has clearly done this a thousand times and will do it a thousand more. This Naxos disc has that sound. It also, mercifully, has the songs to justify it.

John Ireland does not get talked about enough. He sits awkwardly in English music’s family photograph — too chromatic for the folk-song revivalists, too English for the modernists, haunted (literally, if you believe the biographers) by Sussex hillsides and standing stones and something unresolved in his own private life that never quite made it into the official record. His piano music gets an occasional outing. The songs turn up in recitals. But the church music? Neglected, mostly, and that is a shame, because Ireland understood liturgical time the way he understood the ticking pulse of a piano prelude — patiently, without hurry.

The Te Deum in F, composed in 1907, opens the disc with a confidence that owes something to Stanford — Ireland studied with him at the Royal College, endured his sarcasm, absorbed his craftsmanship — but there is a harmonic restlessness under the surface that is pure Ireland, a kind of modal shading that keeps pulling the ear sideways. Six minutes and forty-five seconds of very English pomp, delivered here without much swagger. That is not necessarily a criticism. Ireland’s church music was written for parish choirs, not cathedral spectacle, and this rendition understands its scale.

The Communion Service in C is the heart of the disc, and rightly the longest single item on it. The Kyrie has a tenderness that does, yes, recall Fauré — that particular kind of quiet chordal ache — though Ireland’s harmonic language stays resolutely tonal, never drifting into Gallic ambiguity for its own sake. The Sanctus glows. The Gloria, by contrast, opens the throttle, and here the choir sounds a touch cautious, the sopranos not quite trusting the top of their range. I wanted more abandon. Ireland wrote music that WANTS to be sung with more chest voice than English liturgical tradition typically allows, and I kept waiting for someone to just let go.

“My Song Is a Love Unknown” — the Crossman hymn, not to be confused with the Vaughan Williams-adjacent “Love Unknown” tune many congregations actually sing — remains one of the great English hymn melodies of the twentieth century, full stop. Two minutes fifty-six seconds, and it does more emotional work than pieces four times its length. The choir here sings it plainly, without artifice, which is exactly right. Ireland did not need help.

“The Holy Boy,” dating from the First World War years (1913–15, depending which biographical account you trust — Ireland’s chronology is a minefield of revision), is offered here in its choral guise rather than the more famous piano original, and it works beautifully — the melody was always halfway to a carol anyway. Among the Four Unaccompanied Carols, “Adam Lay Ybounden” is astonishingly compact, less than two minutes, and “New Prince, New Pomp” has a modal austerity that looks back past Stanford to Tudor consort music, or maybe to the medieval texts themselves — Ireland was a serious antiquarian, remember, fascinated by ritual and pre-Christian England in a way that occasionally unsettled his more conventional churchwardens.

The two organ works are where this disc earns its interest for listeners who think they already know Ireland cold. The Elegiac Romance, composed in 1902 while he was still finding his feet at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, is a strange, wandering piece — lyrical, yes, but with a knotted, searching middle section (from around the six-minute mark) that refuses easy resolution. It sounds like a young composer working something out in real time, on the bench, late, after the congregation has gone home. Ireland spent twenty-two years as organist and choirmaster at St Luke’s, Chelsea, grinding through the Anglican liturgical calendar week after week, and you can hear that accumulated, unglamorous experience in every bar of this repertoire — it is music written by someone who knew exactly what a choir could and couldn’t do on a wet Tuesday evensong with half the altos absent.

Where this release sits against the competition: Richard Hickox’s Chandos version of “Greater Love” — not part of this Naxos program’s contents. That is worth noting, since Ireland’s most emotionally devastating choral utterance, the wartime meditation on greater love hath no man, is nowhere on this disc. Anyone wanting the full Ireland church-music picture will need both.

Still, taken on its own terms, this is a valuable, unpretentious anthology, well-engineered, decently sung, and long overdue. Not a first choice for the desert island. An essential footnote to a composer who deserves considerably more than footnotes.