Wesley Anthems and Canticles – St Johns College Choir

Cranky, brilliant, and perpetually dissatisfied — that was Wesley, and it comes through in every bar of this music, which never quite settles for the obvious cadence when a stranger one will do.

He deserved better than the churches that employed him, or so he never tired of saying. Hereford, Exeter, Leeds, Winchester, Gloucester: five churches, four cathedrals, and an ongoing argument with every dean and chapter unlucky enough to sign his contract. The English cathedral establishment of the 1830s and 40s wanted competent time-servers. It got, instead, the grandson of Charles Wesley, a composer who had absorbed Spohr’s chromaticism and Mendelssohn’s part-writing and meant to drag Anglican music into the nineteenth century whether the vergers liked it or not. Mostly they didn’t.

This new St John’s disc, sung by the present-day choir under Andrew Nethsingha with John Challenger a vivid, alert presence at the organ, understands something too many recordings of this repertoire miss: Wesley’s anthems are essentially operatic in conception even when their subject is a psalm. The Wilderness and the Solitary Place, premiered at Hereford in 1832, is scaled like a scena, its independent organ part almost orchestral in ambition, more Weber than Croft. Nethsingha lets it breathe. The choir’s trebles are bright, occasionally a touch effortful at full cry, wonderfully true down low. They carry Isaiah’s text with real dramatic weight rather than the polite blandness so many English collegiate choirs bring to Wesley, as if embarrassed by his excess.

“Blessed be the God and Father,” from about a year later, is the famous one, the anthem every parish choir in England has attempted and most have mangled. Written, the story goes, for a single tenor and trebles because that was all Hereford could muster on a bad Sunday, it succeeds anyway. Indeed it succeeds because of the limitation, its harmonic daring compressed into an almost domestic scale. St John’s brings unusual tenderness to the unaccompanied passages. Intonation here is scarily precise, the kind of precision that sounds unforced rather than drilled.

“Wash me throughly from my wickedness” is shorter, stranger, sadder. Four minutes, no more. But Wesley’s part-writing turns Psalm 51 into genuine desolation: voices dropping away, isolating each other, the harmony refusing comfort until it’s almost too late to matter. I’ve heard this anthem done more beautifully in a purely vocal sense — King’s under Willcocks, decades back, on a now-deleted Argo LP, if memory serves — but rarely with such attention to the text’s loneliness.

“Ascribe unto the Lord,” the big fourteen-minute anthem of 1851, is where Wesley shows his full hand, and where Mendelssohn’s ghost hovers most conspicuously, particularly in the fugal writing and the almost programmatic opposition between the vanity of idols and the steadfastness of those who fear the Lord. It’s a long piece to sustain, and a lesser choir would let the architecture sag in the middle third. This one doesn’t. Challenger’s registration choices, a certain reediness held in reserve for the climaxes, help enormously.

Samuel Wesley’s Psalms 42 and 43, tucked in as a kind of filial tribute, remind us where the son got his harmonic curiosity, if not his neurotic perfectionism. The father was the family’s Bach obsessive, its keyboard virtuoso, its scandal (an illegitimate son, an accident that may have caused years of mental instability). Sturdier, plainer music than S.S. Wesley’s, but not negligible, and good to have here for context rather than as mere padding.

The Magnificat and Nunc dimittis in E major deserves more currency than it gets. Eight-part writing, confidently handled, dramatic without tipping into the melodrama that occasionally undoes Wesley elsewhere. This is Evening Canticles as small tone poem, and Nethsingha paces the Gloria with real cumulative sweep. The Larghetto in F sharp minor, offered as a chamber-organ interlude, is a lovely piece of housekeeping: Wesley in his private, unbuttoned mode, thinking in key relationships the way Chopin thought in them, minus the pianism.

“O Thou who camest from above,” the hymn tune Hereford, one of Wesley’s genuine hits, sung in countless parishes to this day without anyone knowing quite who wrote it, gets a straightforward, unfussy reading here. Sometimes the plainest option is correct.

Is this the best Wesley disc available? Hyperion’s older survey with the choir of St Paul‘s under John Scott has more raw vocal heft in places; the Christ Church, Oxford recordings under Stephen Darlington bring a different, more austere beauty. But for sheer intelligence of programming, and for a Nethsingha reading that treats Wesley as a serious dramatist rather than a Victorian curiosity, this disc earns its place at the front of the shelf. Recommended, with genuine enthusiasm rather than the usual critical shrug.