Vaughan Williams Service in D minor – Hammond-Davies

Vaughan Williams never went to church much, by his own cheerful admission — an atheist who “later drifted into a cheerful agnosticism,” as he once put it — and yet he wrote some of the most persuasive sacred music of the twentieth century. That paradox sits at the heart of this new disc, and it never quite resolves.

The Service in D minor, written for Christ’s Hospital in 1938, is not the piece most listeners associate with this composer. It has none of the pastoral haze of the Tallis Fantasia, none of the granite grandeur of Sancta Civitas. It is, instead, plain-spoken, as though the composer wanted the choristers of that famous Bluecoat school to sing something free of Victorian incense. The “Te Deum” opens with a unison statement that could almost be mistaken for plainchant filtered through Tallis, before the harmony blooms outward into those characteristic false relations.

Six minutes twenty-five seconds. That’s all it takes.

The “Benedictus” is where the reading under review earns its keep. Tempo relaxes, texture thins to little more than treble line and discreet organ underlay, and the choir — trebles especially — manage the tricky trick of sounding both boyish and grave. I’ve heard trebles shriek this music into blandness; here the tone stays rounded, vowels tall, the diction never fussy.

The “Jubilate Deo” closes the set in under three minutes, brisk and unfussy, organ pedal work lending just enough weight without swamping the voices. It doesn’t overstay its welcome.

The engineers have resisted the temptation to drown everything in cathedral reverberation. Here you get presence, air, a sense of a real room with real breathing choristers in it, coughs and all, faintly, at the edges. That’s not a complaint.

Where does this sit against the field? King’s College under Willcocks or Cleobury gave the Anglican repertoire a burnished, almost orchestral sheen that some listeners adore and others find suffocating. This performance takes the opposite tack: leaner, more direct, closer in spirit to what a provincial school chapel in 1938 might actually have sounded like, rough edges included. I don’t think it’s better in every particular. The trebles occasionally thin out under pressure in climactic passages, and ensemble in the “Te Deum” wavers by a hair at the più mosso. But authenticity of spirit counts for something here.

Vaughan Williams composed this service the same decade he wrote Five Tudor Portraits, with the Fifth Symphony still years off. He does not preach. He does not decorate. He sets the words as though they mattered on their own terms — which, whatever his private beliefs, tells you something about how seriously he took Cranmer’s prose.

Recommended, without major reservation. Not every act of devotion needs incense. Sometimes plain speech, well sung, is devotion enough.