He is a virtuoso of the jaunty rhythm and the doyen of the singable tune. He has a way with suspensions – crunchy enough for resolution to break through like sunlight, but strictly PG-rated compared with the harmonic adventures of his contemporaries. His music is as unfashionably essential as a five-pack of M&S briefs, as ineffably English as queueing.
From two royal weddings and a coronation to choir rehearsals, school assemblies and carol services across the UK and North America, British composer John Rutter has dominated the anglophone choral scene for six decades. At 80, he is in a league of his own: a niche national treasure, even referred to as “the composer who owns Christmas”.
St Paul’s was packed for this concert featuring the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bach Choir with Rutter himself conducting. The cathedral’s magnificent dome makes for an acoustic in which coughing ricochets like gunfire, but this cross-generational audience sat through the long programme in rapt silence. The dome can also wreak havoc for the unsuspecting performer, of course – but it was no match for Rutter. He simply worked with its foibles, inserting minute pauses to allow chords to bloom and leaving its extraordinary reverberation to take over at the end of each number.
Two large-scale works for chorus and orchestra by Rutter sandwiched Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No 5, in which the rougher edges of VW’s pastoral modernism were smoothed to a high shine, the RPO’s strings expensively blended, the climaxes irresistibly majestic and topped by gleaming brass. The world premiere of Rutter’s I’ll Make Me a World showcased miraculous diction from the Bach Choir and the RPO’s flair for musical code-switching, as baritone Jonathan Brown and mezzo Melanie Marshall led the way through gentle references to African American spirituals, blues and gospel.
Rutter’s 2015 cantata The Gift of Life, setting a range of religious texts including verses of his own, offered a subtly different compendium: tender melodies and snazzy syncopations, Broadway-ready orchestral introductions and sopranos illuminating the texture’s upper reaches. It was polished, predictable and visibly enjoyed by the musicians on stage – unmistakably the work of a master craftsman.
