Musical musings: Chris Gray reminisces about his time at Truro Cathedral
As director of music Chris Gray prepares to leave Truro Cathedral after Easter to move on to St John’s College Cambridge, read his latest blog.
Starting out
In September 2000, fresh out of university, I began my working life in Cornwall. I had been appointed to the role of assistant organist at Truro Cathedral by Organist and Master of the Choristers Andrew Nethsingha and Dean Michael Moxon. I felt very lucky to have got the job but, looking back on it now, I can see even more the extent to which I had hit the jackpot: Truro is the perfect place to come as a young organist and aspiring choir director, for so many reasons.
Alongside the revered Father Willis organ, Truro Cathedral was well-known for the excellence and ambition of its choir. At its heart, then and now, is an authenticity that comes from being rooted in the cathedral’s magnificent liturgy. One of the strongest things I will take with me as I move on is an admiration and appreciation for members of the back row of the choir and chorister families over successive generations who have made enormous sacrifices to keep our precious choral tradition alive and flourishing. Their dedication, sincerity and passion are inspiring.
As well as the opportunity to work with the cathedral choir during my eight years as Assistant Organist, I worked with a wide variety of other musicians, young and old. We founded Cornwall Junior Choir and then Cornwall Youth Choir and it was a joy to work with so many young people who may otherwise have had no engagement with singing: this was a time before the Government’s ‘Sing Up’ initiative, when many primary schools had little or no music provision. Likewise, working regularly with very gifted pupils at Richard Lander School and Truro School showed me time and time again that there is talent all around us – there are so many who could achieve the musical heights our choristers achieve, if only the seed were watered. In 2001 I took over from David Cheetham as musical director of St Mary’s Singers and I’m delighted that the annual Palm Sunday performance we instituted of Bach’s St John Passion has become a firmly-established tradition. We also performed Bach’s St Matthew Passion and Mass in B Minor, as well as the Monteverdi Vespers and lots of contemporary music that culminated in a CD, ‘Salmow Kernewek’, that I remain proud of to this day.
The inner team
Having learned much from Andrew Nethsingha (1994-2002) and then Robert Sharpe (2002-2008), both masters of their art, I was appointed to carry the mantle as director of music in 2008. It was a simpler time when one could aspire to end the day with a clear inbox. My first priority was to appoint the best possible assistant organist for the cathedral, and I secured an early success when Luke Bond signed on the dotted line. It was a joy to work with Luke (2008-17), and his successors. This is not a job you can do alone, and their work and support have played a key part in generations of our musicians achieving their full potential. In that vein, but a little more behind the scenes, are six unsung (if you’ll forgive the pun) heroes whom I will miss greatly when I move on: our close team of Choir Assistants who look after the cathedral choir, currently Hazel Helliwell, Lois Bush and Lynne Walker; and our Chorister Mentors, teaching staff at Truro School whose duties include looking after the choristers and ensuring that their academic and musical commitments dovetail, Annabel Gregory, Peter Thomson and Rachel Vaughan. You could scour the land and not find more perfect people for these crucial roles. They keep everything we do grounded in dignity, compassion and good practice, and it is enriching to work with people who care so much. Speaking of such people, Martin Palmer has had a central role in the choristers’ happiness and development in his role as Director of Music at Truro School, not to mention a central role in my own happiness and development in his role as friend and occasional running companion. And I must also pay tribute to the array of singing teachers who have helped our choristers to fulfil their potential over the years, especially Margaret Kingsley and Ruth Dean.
Highlights
I’m going to pick out just a few specific things from the past fourteen years that live in my mind, fairly near the surface.
The memory of the girl choristers’ first service back in 2015 is something I will always treasure. Different cathedrals have introduced girl choristers in different ways, depending on the local lie of the land – there is no one right or wrong way. For Dean Roger, Truro School headmaster Andrew Gordon-Brown and me, the girl choristers at Truro had to join the boy choristers as equal custodians of the same choral tradition (we were keen that they were never referred to as our ‘girls’ choir’ – we don’t have one of those; there is one choir, Truro Cathedral Choir, and it has both boy and girl choristers). At the heart of the ceremony to admit our first cohort of girls, the boy choristers lined up in front of the girls and handed them their white surplices, welcoming them into the tradition. Thinking of that moment almost always makes me well up, as I am doing now. With this, and women altos now performing alongside our male counter-tenors, the choir family feels complete and fit for purpose serving a modern cathedral.
In 2013, I instigated a project to reconstruct the first ever ‘Festival of Nine Lessons with Carols’ devised for Truro Cathedral by our first Bishop, Edward Benson, in 1880. Knowing how much Cornwall values its history and culture, I thought there would be a good number of people present, but I was very surprised when I stepped out to give a talk about the reconstruction three-quarters of an hour before the re-enacted service itself to find around 700 people already there. You can still hear a live recording of that service on the cathedral choir’s Soundcloud (Tuesday 17th December 2013). A year later, we made a live DVD recording of our ‘Nine Lessons’ service in its current form – it was perhaps the most pressurised performance I’ve been a part of, with so much riding on everything being right in the moment, but the choir rose to the occasion, as they unfailingly do. The DVD is still available on the Regent label and it also includes an audio recording of the reconstructed 1880 service as well as a documentary capturing all of the research carried out by Jeremy Summerly and Richard Longman as well as invaluable contributions by Michael Swift and Canon Perran Gay, Precentor at the time. Of the thirteen cathedral choir recordings I’ve directed, all with Regent, this was the one that asked the most of producer, sound engineer and friend Gary Cole – through his artistry, technical and musical, and his tireless dedication and hard work, he has captured our choir in the best possible light on every occasion.
I must, at this point, mention Three Spires Singers whom I have also directed since 2008. Committees don’t get any better than theirs, and it has been a pleasure to work with chairs Priscilla Reeve and Lora Wicks to present some of the greatest music ever penned, from Handel’s Messiah to Verdi’s Requiem, Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius and so many more masterpieces. I have loved exploring this glorious music with the very talented 100-strong choir as well as with many of Cornwall’s finest instrumental musicians and top-flight professional soloists.
In 2014 I had the privilege of conducting two performances of Britten’s War Requiem as part of a collaboration between the cathedral and Three Spires Singers to mark the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War. Then, in 2018, the cathedral marked the 100th anniversary of the War ending with a commission from my close friend and regular artistic collaborator Russell Pascoe, his Three Remembrance Anthems. These were occasions when it felt like we were especially relevant and helpful to a great many people, well beyond our usual bubble, who turned to the cathedral and to great art as they sought to reflect and remember. I was pleased that my last recording with the cathedral choir, released last term, featured the Three Remembrance Anthems as part of a single-composer CD of music by Russell, including his Secular Requiem. Russell has lived and breathed everything in this blog with me, and his wise counsel has helped me avoid many an open manhole cover over the years. We agree on virtually everything except Sankey hymns and God.
Among many further nourishing collaborative projects have been commissions and single-composer CDs of music by Philip Stopford, Gabriel Jackson and Dobrinka Tabakova, and commissions from David Bednall, Jonathan Carne, Paul Comeau, Paul Drayton, Graham Fitkin, Howard Goodall, James MacMillan, Julian Philips, Helena Paish, Sasha Johnson Manning and Richard Shephard. As well as almost annual live BBC Radio 3 Choral Evensongs, we have broadcast three BBC Radio 3 concerts, and had collaborations with Tenebrae, The Gesualdo Six, BBC Concert Orchestra, City of London Sinfonia and BBC National Orchestra of Wales. And then, in 2019, there was Britain’s Got Talent – slightly surreal, but I don’t think any of our choristers will ever forget the electricity when they stepped on stage at the London Palladium and got four yeses from Simon Cowell and his colleagues. It was all worth it when I was recognised by one of the staff in Warren’s and got a free doughnut the day after it aired. A few months after BGT we travelled to Austria and Slovakia for a wonderful tour. It’s always good to travel and explore new places with our close-knit team, and I have the happiest memories of tours in previous years to Italy, France, Spain, the Isles of Scilly, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Sweden and Germany.
Covid
I need to say a word about Covid. Personally, I found the first lockdown the most challenging period of my life. The effort of masking what, with hindsight, was probably depression was debilitating as I tried to be cheery for the boy and girl choristers in their regular Zoom sessions. Many of the choristers were suffering in different ways too, of course. Rebuilding their stamina and high-level skill set, while on a journey towards getting my own reserves replenished, was difficult, but that has made me all the more proud of where we have got to now. It helps that we have exceptionally lovely, thoughtful and kind boys and girls. Truro School played a central role in getting the choristers back up and running and avoiding the very real possibility that the whole tradition would fall apart. I was grateful for the support of the Heads of Truro School and Truro School Prep, Andy Johnson and Sarah Patterson, who moved heaven and earth to get the choristers singing in person, as much as the rules permitted, at every stage. The school has similarly provided enormous support to enable seven of our girl choristers to sing at the Coronation of King Charles and the Queen Consort at Westminster Abbey in May, and we are fortunate that this key relationship between school and cathedral is so strong.
Volunteers
Over the years I have been blessed to have offers of help in certain areas from chorister parents with particular expertise. Currently, that team includes Andrew Gemmill who handles our live streaming, Sarah McLachlan who helps us to devise and administer good systems for countless organisational things behind the scenes, and Esmé Page who helps with specific initiatives and overall strategy advice. Each of them has given us hundreds of hours of high-level time and enabled us to undertake projects that have strengthened the foundations of the choir and widened what it is able to achieve. Having worked with Esmé on Grenfell: From Today and Sing2G7, her latest initiative is Chorister Zoom Assemblies – we have just presented our third one of these, with more than 2,000 children taking part. We also worked on the Sponsor A Chorister scheme together, and have recently been working on approaches to Cornwall’s business community. I’m not sure where we would be without the help of Andrew, Esmé and Sarah, and others before them.
Moving on
In what I’ve said so far there is a key piece missing, and it’s so easy to take it for granted: our almost daily round of rehearsals and services is at the beating heart of Truro Cathedral and its choir. The church year anchors all that we do and provides some of our most fulfilling experiences, often at the times you least expect them – I hope that will continue to be the case at St John’s.
In finding my way with everything above, Truro has been a very forgiving place to make mistakes and learn. Conversations in the pub with the back row of the choir are often fascinating and, over the years, have helped to shape how I do my job as I get more attuned to what is of most use to the singers. The community – the choir, the cathedral and Cornwall – could not be more affirming: I wish everyone could experience what it’s like to work somewhere where you feel so valued.
Among the many sadnesses I feel at the prospect of leaving Truro, one is that I will not have the opportunity of working more with Dean Simon. My successor, James Anderson-Besant, will have that pleasure when he arrives at the start of June; I have been having detailed handover conversations with him and can’t imagine a better marriage of person and role.
You might reasonably wonder why on earth I would even think about leaving. Sometimes you just need a change, no matter how much you enjoy a particular job or place. St John’s offers fresh challenges and a different ecosystem to explore. It has long had one of my favourite choirs: many of the earliest CDs I bought as a teenager were of the St John’s choir under George Guest’s direction; as an undergraduate at Cambridge I used to go regularly to services under Christopher Robinson’s direction; and I’ve heard them regularly under the equally inspiring leadership of David Hill and Andrew Nethsingha. It’s not an opportunity I thought would ever come my way; that it did is the most ringing endorsement of Truro Cathedral Choir and the excellence which is a product primarily of the singers’ talent and commitment as well as decades of unwavering support from Chapter and of the community.
My wonderful colleague Andrew Wyatt will be a brilliant steward during the short interregnum period from Easter until James arrives in June. I will be holding Andrew, James, Dean Simon and the whole community in my prayers, though I realise those prayers will no longer be a ‘local call’ once I cross the Tamar.
Chris’s last service as the director of music will be 16:00 Evensong on Easter Day, 9 April. All are welcome to this, and to an informal farewell event in the nave immediately afterwards.