How Andrew Nethsingha and St John’s is fighting its 500-year-old corner.
Michael White writing in The Daily Telegraph in November past :
Advent Sunday yesterday kicked into play the season of choirs, carols, and the most evocative sung repertory of the year. I was in Cambridge, doing Advent with a vengeance and somewhat promiscuously, college-hopping from lunch with the former music director of Clare (Tim Brown) to tea with his successor (Graham Ross), then drinks with their counterpart at St John’s (Andrew Nethsingha), and the Clare Coll carol service in between. I get around.
But then there’s a lot of getting around to do these days on the Cambridge choral circuit. In the past you had King’s and John’s, and that was it: no other college chapel had a comparable profile. Now it’s different. The mixed-gender choirs of Clare and Trinity are major players. Caius is on the up. And what used to be a gentlemanly co-existence between neighbouring choral foundations has become rather tense since certain colleges decided to make strategic bids for higher status, pulling in big names from the broader, non-academic world to add lustre to their chapel music. Trinity now has Stephen Layton on staff and pursues promising vocal talent with the zeal of corporate head-hunters. Sidney Sussex has lured the glamorous Eric Whitacre over from America. The stakes are getting higher.
Talking to Andrew Nethsingha last night, I wondered what that meant for John’s which, this year, has been making the 500th anniversary of the college an opportunity for some serious marketing. Traditionally, John’s has always been a celebrated choir but not so celebrated as its rival King’s, whose Christmas Eve lessons & carols sweeps the board in terms of broadcast profile. As No 2 in the pecking order, John’s has had to make its mark as something distinct from King’s with a different sort of sound: a more robust, more European, maybe earthier sound, developed by George Guest in the 50s/60s, and still noticeably present.
Nethsingha, who took over five years ago but is steeped in that sound as a one-time organ scholar under Guest, describes it as “not so extreme as Westminster Cathedral [which also cultivates European tendencies] but based on the idea of warmth. It’s maybe more relaxed than King’s, but strong on clarity – which has a lot to do with our building. John’s chapel isn’t so hugely resonant as King’s, but arguably that makes it a better place for singing. The acoustic doesn’t swamp us”.
Earlier this year there was a grand anniversary gathering of John’s choral scholars old and new, including veterans from the 60s, and Nethsingha was pleased to hear that they thought the basics of the Guest sound still in place despite three changes of director. But in other respects, John’s has been careful to move with the times.
One innovation since Nethsingha took over is a weekly webcast beaming choral evensong across the world. John’s was the first significant choir on this side of the globe to do anything of the sort (needless to say, St Thomas 5th Avenue got there first), and though Nethsingha is slightly vague about what it has achieved, he does get encouraging letters from odd spots like Honolulu – where there are apparently people who lie garlanded on the beach in grass skirts, listening keenly to Stanford in D and counting the weeks until Like as the Hart comes round again.
It would be interesting to know if these webcasts had any effect on the number and quality of candidates for choral scholarships. Recruitment to the Cambridge choirs is a highly contentious issue in the university right now, as it faces pressure from government to overhaul its admissions procedures. It’s widely thought that having a good voice can get you into a good college by the back door, which in my experience isn’t true. But for the sake of appearances, changes are on the way that could turn the Cambridge choral system upside down, and not for the better.
Nethsingha wouldn’t be drawn on the subject when we talked; it’s obviously sensitive. But then, he does have other things to think about, including a massive anniversary concert of Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast at the Festival Hall on December 15th. Belshazzar isn’t obvious collegiate choir material: it’s the stuff of large-scale amateur choral societies delivering more volume than finesse. But to make the necessary weight of sound, Nethsingha has asked a collected army of other Cambridge chapel choirs – Trinity, Clare, Jesus, Caius (not King’s!) – to join in. And it can only be a Belshazzar like you’ve never heard before. Edgy and fierce. Not totally dissimilar to how things are in Cambridge choral circles at the moment.
Michael White
Michael White was voted Britain’s least boring music critic by listeners of Classic FM. He has made documentaries about Menotti, Britten and Nielsen and once attempted to explain Wagner’s Ring Cycle on TV in half an hour. He’s the author of two books: Introducing Wagner (Icon) and Opera & Operetta (HarperCollins).