Briggs : Mass - International Record Review

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There's only one word for this. Spectacular.

Let's start with the recording. Gloucester
Cathedral is an eminently sensible choice of
location, for not only is its generous acoustic
far more suited to music on this expansive
scale than the choir's home soil back in
Cambridge but the organ is one intimately
known to David Briggs, who clearly revels
in its manifest glories. Hyperion’s engineers
have put the music nicely at the centre of
the stage but with the lavish acoustic, suitably
tamed and restrained, very much at the heart
of it all. There's a lovely unaccompanied
setting of Ubi caritas (interestingly, managing
to avoid Durufle until the 'Amen') which
seems to float around the cathedral like so
much incense smoke catching the light
streaming in through the windows, while
the massive bursts of organ improvisation
- notably that prompted by the Te Deum -
mostly have a kind of frenzied breathlessness
which would be claustrophobic in a more
immediate aural setting, yet emerge here
with spaciousness but also considerable clarity
of detail (the bubbling organ introduction to
the 'Benedictus ' is beautifully caught by the
microphones).

Equally spectacular is the choral singing. It
was the late George Guest who used to
suggest that any choir would sound good in
the King's College, Cambridge acoustic, but
a choir had to be very good to sound well in
a less sympathetic one (he suffered from a
rather less kindly acoustic down the road at
St John's). He proved his point time and time
again when the St John's Choir went out on
the road, as do its present-day Trinity College
counterpart, but it strikes me that it takes
a very special choir indeed to make not just
a good sound but to maintain total musical
integrity when out of its home territory and
in as sumptuous an aural setting as Gloucester
Cathedral. We know from its impressive
history of fine recordings that the Trinity
College Choir is musically one of the best
around, but here it makes a truly spectacular
sound. Stephen Layton has inspired his singers
to heights of magnificence, relishing Briggs's
penchant for rich, sumptuous harmonies and
ravishing melodic lines, but at the same time
moving beyond mere effect and rooting out
the genuine musical intensity behind these
finely crafted works.

Then there is the spectacular music. Since I
first heard him live in his days at Truro, I
have been spellbound by Briggs's exceptional
gifts as in improviser. True, his improvisations
have such persuasively French accents that one
wonders whether' he can still speak English,
yet this is no mere pastiche-Messiaen or
pseudo-Durufle (although the improvised
Sortie will be mistaken by some, I'm sure,
for Durufle's own Toccata) but a musical
voice of real individuality. He draws perhaps
more from early twentieth-century Paris than
anvwhcre else but is a distinctive personality
in 'his own right. His improvisations here '
are brilliant - there's no point suggesting
otherwise - but more significant are his
written-out choral works. The musical voice
we hear in the improvisations is certainly
present in the choral music, yet it's so
finely crafted and idiomatically written
that we realize that, as a composer, Briggs
is no mere writer-out of inspirational ideas
but a man with a well-honed gift for creating
true music.

Last, but by no means least, is the
spectacular playing of Briggs himself.
Whether he's leaping about the organ with
the athleticism of a World-Cup goal-scorer'
or writhing in intense introspection (like
an injured mid-fielder, but with greater
conviction), he has that sense that he knows
exactly what he's about, creating dramatic
and powerful effects with dazzling virtuosity
and in total control of the instrument.

As I say, there's only one word for this, Spectacular.

Marc Rochester

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