Pelham Humfrey: Sacred Choral Music – McHardy

Died at twenty-six, and you can hear the hurry in the music — not haste exactly, but a young man’s appetite for effect, for the theatrical gesture that Charles II had come to expect after his years of exile in France, listening to Lully’s strings sigh and swell at Saint-Germain. Pelham Humfrey absorbed that idiom faster than anyone else in Restoration London. He died before he could do much more than establish it. What we have left is fragmentary, precocious, sometimes astonishing, and almost never heard.

This new Delphian disc matters more than its modest fifty-nine minutes might suggest. Joseph McHardy and the choir of the Chapel Royal — Humfrey’s own choir, the institution he served as Master of the Children after Captain Cooke’s death in 1672 — give us the Service in E minor complete, morning and evening canticles along with the Communion Service. That alone is worth the price of admission. Nethsingha’s St John’s disc gave us the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis but not the rest; McGegan and Higginbottom, in their respective anthology discs, never touched the service music at all. So here, finally, is a chance to hear Humfrey work on a larger canvas than the verse anthem allows.

And it’s a real revelation, that E minor service: astringent, harmonically restless in a way that Blow rarely risks and Purcell would later refine into something smoother. The “Kyrie” of the Communion Service has a chromatic inflection that catches you off guard, a little shadow crossing the face of the music before it resolves. McHardy’s choir sings it with unforced gravity, trebles bright but not shrill, the alto line — taken here, in the solo movements, by Alexander Chance — floating with a plangent, slightly veiled tone that suits Humfrey’s harmonic ambiguity rather better than a more forthright countertenor would.

The symphony anthems are where Humfrey’s French apprenticeship shows most nakedly. O give thanks unto the Lord opens with string writing that wants to be an overture at Versailles and only remembers itself as English church music partway through: dotted rhythms, a certain swagger, the instrumental ensemble here trim and alert rather than plush. By the waters of Babylon is the more interesting piece, frankly, its harmonic language darker, more inward. Nicholas Mulroy sings the tenor solos with real narrative sense, shaping the text — the captivity, the hung-up harps, the taunting captors — as if he’d just discovered the words rather than performed them for the thousandth time. Nick Pritchard partners him well in the duet passages. The two tenor timbres don’t quite match, which is not a criticism, only an observation: Restoration verse-writing thrives on contrast of voice as much as blend.

Ashley Riches gets the weightiest solo writing, and O Lord my God suits him: a bass voice with real color at the bottom, not just volume, and the kind of rhetorical instinct that word-painting of this vintage demands. You want a singer who can turn “trouble” into a genuinely troubled sound without hamming it up. Riches doesn’t ham. He does something better: he lets the harmony do the emoting and simply colors the vowels to match.

McHardy’s direction throughout favors clarity over grandeur, reasonable given the venue and forces, though I confess I occasionally wanted a touch more weight in the tuttis, a little more chest voice from the men. The Chapel Royal acoustic, captured here with unfussy immediacy, doesn’t drown detail the way some larger cathedral spaces would. You hear inner voices, false relations, the actual grain of seventeenth-century harmony.

Is Humfrey a major composer manqué, or a minor one who happened to die before disappointing us? I lean toward the former, though the evidence is necessarily incomplete — a life cut short leaves scholars and critics alike arguing counterfactuals. What this disc proves, at minimum, is that the service music deserves a place beside the anthems, that Humfrey’s harmonic imagination was already more adventurous than his teacher Cooke’s or his contemporary Blow’s, and that a choir steeped daily in this repertoire, literally singing in the room where it was first heard, brings an authority that itinerant early-music ensembles, however accomplished, can only approximate.

Recommended, without much hesitation: a necessary corrective to a criminally thin discography, and evidence that Restoration England produced more than one composer worth remembering by name.