Ireland: Sacred Choral Works by Lincoln Cathedral Choir

John Ireland occupies one of those peculiar positions in English music — celebrated enough to be inescapable in certain Anglican circles, obscure enough that his name draws blank stares outside them. He is not Elgar, not Britten, not even Finzi. He is something more parochial, and I mean that with genuine affection.

For anyone who came up singing in the English choral tradition — Matins, Evensong, the whole exquisite, faintly exhausting machinery of it — Ireland’s service music is simply part of the furniture. The Communion Service in C especially has that quality of music so deeply absorbed it stops being heard. You sing it the way you breathe. Which is, of course, a problem for a critic.

What Lincoln Cathedral Choir manages here is the thing that’s hardest to do with music this familiar: they make you listen. Not always. The Te Deum has moments where routine takes over and the ensemble sounds merely competent — the unison passages between voices, which Ireland deploys with real strategic intelligence, occasionally feel dispatched rather than shaped. But then a phrase will open unexpectedly, the organ entering with that characteristic Ireland blend of Edwardian solidity and something subtler underneath, and you remember why this music survived.

Ireland learned his craft under Stanford — and Stanford’s fingerprints are everywhere here, in the clean part-writing, the unpretentious word-setting, the refusal of cheap effect. But Ireland had his own harmonic restlessness, something that sets him apart from his teacher’s more confident diatonic manner. Those slightly sideways chord progressions, the ones that make you tilt your head — they’re not modernist, exactly, but they’re not entirely comfortable either. Ireland spent his formative professional years at Holy Trinity, Sloane Street, and later at St. Luke’s, Sydney Street in Chelsea, working-class origins dressed in middle-class propriety, and there’s something of that tension in the music itself.

The organ pieces collected here present a different problem. Ireland was trained as an organist first — it was his primary instrument at the Royal College of Music before composition took over — and these pieces have the pragmatic character of music written to a purpose, which is to say some of them were written to generate income. Biographer Muriel Searle is bracingly direct about this: Ireland used such pieces to top up what was otherwise a comfortable private allowance. The playing on this album is clean and stylistically assured, but I sometimes wanted more — more risk, more of the peculiar chromatic shimmer that makes Ireland’s piano music so arresting, translated into an organ idiom.

Still. There is real pleasure here. The Evening Service especially rewards attention — the writing for trebles has a luminous quality that Lincoln’s boys catch without sentimentalizing, and the harmonic language in the Magnificat setting opens up in ways that catch you off guard if you’ve grown used to the more buttoned-up Communion Service. Ireland in the evening mode is less certain, more searching. I prefer him that way.

The anniversary context — this was recorded marking fifty years since Ireland’s death in 1962 — adds a faint pressure of occasion without distorting the performances into something commemorative and stiff. These are working musicians in a working cathedral, and that groundedness is ultimately the recording’s greatest virtue and its modest limitation. Essential? Probably not. But honest, well-prepared, and a genuinely useful document of music that deserves more than to be hummed past.