Anglican Chant Psalms – Nethsingha, St Johns College Choir

Anglican chant is a peculiar art — half speech, half song, entirely dependent on a kind of collective breathing that either happens or it doesn’t. You cannot fake it, and you certainly cannot phone it in, not across fifty-some minutes with no orchestra to hide behind and no big tunes to carry you past the dull patches. There aren’t any dull patches here. That surprised me more than I expected it to.

I’ve sat in the chapel of St John’s, Cambridge, on a wet February evensong, watching my own breath practically visible in the cold air near the west door, and I can tell you the acoustic does some of the work for these singers — that famous bloom off the stone, decaying just slowly enough to let a final consonant hang in the air like incense. Signum’s engineers, disc across four years (2018 to 2022, an unusually long gestation that speaks to the disruptions of the pandemic as much as to any grand artistic plan), have caught that bloom without letting it turn to mush. You hear individual voices inside the blend. That’s no small feat in repertoire this exposed.

Andrew Nethsingha inherited a chant tradition at St John’s that goes back, through Christopher Robinson and George Guest, to a lineage of pointing and phrasing that treats the psalter almost as recitative — Purcellian in its sensitivity to English word-stress, decades before anyone thought to call it “historically informed.” Guest in particular was famous for a certain elastic, almost rubato treatment of chant that some cathedral musicians found too free, too operatic. Nethsingha’s choir has inherited the sensitivity without the mannerism. The pointing breathes. It doesn’t preen.

What strikes me, track after track, is the sheer variety of emotional temperature these singers find within a form that on paper looks utterly uniform: a single or double chant, four-square harmony, repeated for verse after verse. Psalm 97’s imagery of clouds and darkness “round about him” gets sung with real weight in the lower voices, an almost Verdian sense of foreboding, while a psalm of praise a few tracks later fairly skips — trebles bright as struck glass, the men underneath them lifting rather than plodding. Nethsingha clearly understands that Anglican chant lives or dies on rhetorical shape: where the line leans, where it releases, where a comma in the text becomes a held breath rather than a hard stop.

The trebles are extraordinary — not merely accurate (though they are that, with an ensemble unanimity that would shame many professional consorts) but alive to text in a way boy choristers, drilled since age seven or eight, don’t always manage. You can hear individual character poking through occasionally, a slightly reedy tone on one top note, a moment of real vulnerability on a text about affliction. It’s not slick in the way some of the more polished continental radio choirs are slick. It’s human, and better for it.

James Anderson-Besant and Glen Dempsey share organ duties, and George Herbert too — appropriately enough, given how thoroughly Herbert the poet-priest understood the marriage of humility and ornament that good chant accompaniment requires. The playing throughout stays discreet, coloring rather than commenting, though there’s a lovely widening of the registration at a climactic “Amen” that had me sitting up. Nobody here is trying to out-Messiaen the psalter. Thank goodness.

Does this displace the classic King’s recordings under David Willcocks, or Guest’s own Argo discs from St John’s decades back? Not exactly — those have a certain patrician grandeur, a slower-burning solemnity that some listeners will always prefer. But this new disc has an immediacy, an unforced dramatic urgency, that feels very much of its moment: less monument, more testimony. Fifty-two minutes, and I wanted more. I did not expect to write that sentence about a disc of chanted psalms. Nethsingha and his singers have made me eat my skepticism, syllable by syllable.