LF 26: A Prayer for Deliverance

St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington, 15/9, 2026

Tenebrae

After the fantastic Tenebrae concert in North Berwick on Monday, an even bigger audience turned up at St Mary’s Kirk in Haddington for their second concert in this year’s Lammermuir Festival. Entitled ‘A Prayer for Deliverance’, the programme centred on the themes of Rest, Repose and Acceptance, covering over two centuries of beautiful music from Arthur Sullivan’s ‘The Long Day Closes’ to the UK premiere of American composer, Joel Thompson’s ‘A Prayer for Deliverance’.

I waxed lyrical about Tenebrae’s first concert, and, with slightly extended forces, this second one was just as good, both performances of a standard rarely heard anywhere. In fact, I might go out on a limb here and state that I have probably never heard better choral singing in my life. Tenebrae are that good! It’s a programme that they have toured extensively and so everyone knows exactly what to sing and when, and that was crystal clear from this concert.

There was perfect balance between voices, total conviction of projection whether loud or soft, complete unanimity on starts and finishes, and clear and direct conducting by the director, Nigel Short.

The concert began with Gustav Holst’s meditation on the Body’s final hours of life in conversation with the Soul, The Evening Watch. Mediaeval mystery plays and some early operas discussed this quasi dialogue at some length, but Holst’s short piece takes us quickly to the crux of the matter. It was beautifully performed and was followed by ‘Standing as I do before God’, Cecilia McDowell’s setting of a text spoken by Edith Cavell, a nurse on the eve of her execution by a German firing squad for helping allied servicemen escape in 1915. The piece was published in 2015, a hundred years after the execution, and is a very moving tribute to an extraordinary woman. Her words are sung by a solo soprano, while the chorus intone a poem by Seán Street reflecting her final steps from the prison cell. Emma Walshe was the exceptional soprano here, clear and calm in the face of horror.

Francis Pott wrote ‘The Souls of the Righteous’ in 2000, and it was given its first performance in Winchester Cathedral that year. A setting of verses from the Book of Wisdom of Solomon, it reflects the writing of William Byrd, whose Justorum Animae set the same words in Latin. There is a substantial tenor solo, which was sung quite superbly by Jeremy Budd, whose voice soared expressively over the choral textures below.

The concert proceeded at the same level of excellence throughout, and the first half ended with Joel Thompson’s ‘A Prayer for Deliverance,’ a work inspired by some terrible deaths of unarmed black men in the USA. This is a bold work, well-suited to the brilliance of Tenebrae, demonstrating the group’s range and versatility.

In the second half, we heard works by John Tavener, Vaughan Williams, Pearsall and Sullivan, before the main piece, Herbert Howell’s Requiem, from 1932, a mixed setting of psalms, the Requiem section of the funeral mass, and two framing sections from the Book of Common Prayer and Revelations. I had never heard this Requiem before, and I found it intensely moving, rendered perfectly by Tenebrae.

William Harris’s ‘Bring us, O Lord’ ended the concert, but the enraptured audience wasn’t going to let Tenebrae escape that easily, and we were offered a lovely encore by John Tavener.

It was a truly superb concert, and we were privileged to be there for it, and its predecessor in North Berwick.

I have one small gripe, and it’s one I have noted elsewhere. The excellent programmes provided by the Lammermuir Festival are universally splendid and put the feeble Edinburgh International Festival programmes to shame, but whoever assumed that the audience only needs the words and translations of foreign texts, must have extraordinary hearing. Polyphonic music gives various texts to various voices at various times, and to assume that we, the audience, can follow simply by listening is absurd. Please print all the words for us to appreciate the texts as we listen, not just the foreign ones!