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The Anglican Singers Repertoire

• Our Father (excerpt) - Herbert Sumsion
• The Lamb - John Tavener
• If ye love me - Thomas Tallis

Our Father - Herbert Sumsion (1899-1995)
Herbert Sumsion’s most recognizable and performed anthem is “They that go down to the sea in ships,” whose text is taken from Psalm 107 – a piece the Anglican Singers have sung on several occasions.  This is a performance of the Our Father from Sumsion’s Preces, Responses and Suffrages, throughout whose musical lines much of the excitement and vivacity of his style is apparent.

The Lamb - John Tavener (b. London, 1944)
“The Lamb” is part of a body of poetry by William Blake (1757-1827), “Songs of Innocence” being the companion to his collection entitled “Songs of Experience.”  Whatever Blake’s intended message, “The Lamb” is exquisitely suited to the Christmas and Easter stories.  Deceptively simple, it is utterly profound.  The same child (God’s Lamb) who comes to earth as a helpless baby becomes the ultimate, once-for-all-time sacrifice and oblation for the sins of the world.

Tavener’s arrangement of “The Lamb” expresses the composer’s eclecticism and mysticism.  It is a haunting motet in which passages of sweet tunefulness are punctuated with weird and unexpected harmonic constructions.

If ye love me - Thomas Tallis (1505-1585)
Thomas Tallis, known as the father of English sacred choral music, wrote the delicate “If ye love me,” one of his contributions to the Protestant Church (Tallis was Catholic):  a spare yet emotive motet in the early, unembellished Anglican style.