Review: Continuum (Director Harry Guthrie): Fifth Anniversary Concert

The young and distinguished vocal ensemble Continuum, founded in 2018 by their Director Harry Guthrie, performed a sequence of choral works, some familiar, others less so, in a concert at St John’s Chapel on Saturday evening to mark the 5th anniversary of their foundation.

Continuum is dedicated to the performance of works either firmly established in the choral repertoire or under-performed, and also to the commissioning new ones.

Appropriately for these times, and especially as Christmas approaches, the group’s choice of music came under their collective title ‘Peace on Earth’.

With so many of its incumbents former Cambridge graduates, the programme began fittingly with a work by a composer with many significant Cambridge connections.

One-time Queen’s graduate Charles Villiers Stanford went on to become organist of Trinity, Chief Conductor of CUMS and ultimately Professor of Music at Cambridge.

Continuum’s delivery of his ‘Three Motets’ was enough to establish clearly why, having somewhat fallen from prominence as he was gradually surpassed in renown by many of his famous pupils, Stanford himself is now the subject of a current revival of interest.

There followed a wonderful performance of Swiss composer Frank Martin’s ‘Mass for Two Choirs’ to take us as far as the Interval.

Like Stanford himself, Martin was a prolific composer of works that encompassed a wide range of genres, and the power of his composing ability was reflected here in each liturgical section of the traditional Catholic Mass.

The hauntingly beautiful Kyrie was delivered with great power, while the Gloria was a deeply reverential segment showcasing Continuum’s impressive bass voices. The complex ‘tu solus sanctus’ evolved into sprightly joy, anticipating both the exuberance of the Credo’s ‘Et resurrexit’ and the jubilant ‘Hosanna.’

In the 200th anniversary of Anton Bruckner’s birth we next heard his ‘Os Justi; Locus Iste; Christus factus est’, a lovely motet (of which Bruckner wrote many) for the dedication of a church.

This so-named ‘Gradual’ in Catholic liturgy is about the oral reception of the Communion host by ‘the mouth of the righteous’ (‘os Justi’) for which ‘this place (‘locus iste’) was made.

After the Interval the well-devised logic of Continuum’s performance followed the story of the Incarnation. Bruckner’s ‘Christus factus est’ was a ravishing delivery by the ensemble in which we heard the outstandingly lovely solo voice of soprano Hannah Dienes-Williams against the background of an equally lovely female chorus.

In Stuart Beer’s ‘darkness fell’ ‘Tenebrae’ refers to the liturgy for Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, while after John Tavener’s concluding piece on the Resurrection, the principal feast of the Church at Easter (‘As one who has slept)’, it was left to Continuum’s astonishing full power in James Macmillan’s ‘Who shall separate us?’ to apply a befitting solemnity to our understanding of the universality of God’s love.

Many in the audience would probably have recalled the inclusion of Macmillan’s piece in the funeral service for Queen Elizabeth 2 at Westminster Abbey two years ago.

As stated, Continuum commissions new work by composers. Stuart Beer’s for example was written for the ensemble in 2023 and this year (2024) a short expressive imprecation by Lucy Walker, ‘In peace I will lie down and sleep’ (Psalm 4:8), was receiving its Cambridge premiere.

Written for Continuum by Lucy (present in the audience), the work is a celebration of Christ as source of peace, of untroubled sleep and of rest, and is a short but intense reflection on the concert’s underlying theme. It was inspiring to witness the pressure of intelligence at work in the composition of such a thing, and Lucy’s ‘In peace’ received the joyful welcome from the audience it certainly deserved.

Continuum concluded ‘Peace on Earth’ with Arnold Schoenberg’s work of this title ‘Friede auf Erden’. Harry Guthrie pointed out that although the language of the composition’s first verse is about the peace we associate with the arrival of Christ at Christmas, it quickly degenerates into that of violence and warfare.

Friede auf Erden is a beautiful but at the same time infinitely sad, reflection on ‘what man has made of man,’ a statement of compromised hopefulness by a Christian convert who returned to his Judaism, and an expression of intrusive disillusionment when considering the prospects for human harmony. The juxtaposition of Macmillan’s and Schoenberg’s work could hardly have had more significance for these uneasy times.

One could only imagine the difficulties this piece involves as being not for the faint-hearted. However, the group’s amazing musicality more than rose to the challenge as their expertise and commitment came over as a lesson in emotive expression and immaculate performance.

The last line of the composition brought all strands of the concert’s title together, putting a seal of outstanding good practice on Continuum’s memorable event with its poignant inclusion of their 5th anniversary’s prayers for ‘Peace, peace on Earth!’