Conductor David Hill is a happy man. With a hectic working life that would defeat most people, he dashes back and forth across the Atlantic between high-profile commitments, directing some of music’s most prestigious ensembles. As he put it: “It’s a mind-boggling schedule, but it’s lucky old me, frankly. I work hard, but I’m having fun, and I always say that if you are not having fun, don’t do it.”
Shortly, that fun will extend to bringing his two worlds together, combining the venerable London-based Bach Choir, which he has directed for 21 years, with the elite forces of Yale Schola Cantorum and the Yale Philharmonia, in a five-city concert tour of the East Coast, marking Yale School of Music’s 125th anniversary and celebrating the deep connections between the US institution and English music.
This Anglo-American project, entitled English Musical Splendor, is just one facet in Hill’s busy musical life which also sees him fill the posts of associate guest conductor of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, director of the Leeds Philharmonic Society and artistic director of the Cambridge Summer Music Festival.
He attributes his ability to keep all these plates spinning to his earlier experience as, successively, master of the music at Westminster Cathedral and Winchester Cathedral and director of music at St. John's College, Cambridge. “Performing polished music at services every day is quite a feat and it really sets you up for this sort of life,” he said down the phone from Yale, where he was making preparations for the US tour. That choral experience led to his appointment successively as principal conductor of Yale Schola Cantorum, music director of The Bach Choir, London, and for 10 years until 2017, chief conductor of the BBC Singers.
Hill is excited at the prospect of combining his 28 Yale singers with 116 members of his beloved Bach Choir, London in Walton’s spectacular oratorio Belshazzar’s Feast – a piece not often performed in the US. Written in 1929, Hill says it “breaks all the rules”. Walton was asked to provide a short cantata for the BBC to include a few instruments, but instead he produced a fully-fledged oratorio, scored for huge forces, including organ and baritone soloist. The BBC took fright and withdrew but then conductor Sir Thomas Beecham became involved.
Beecham suggested to Walton he should add two brass bands “as you’ll never hear the thing again” – a prediction that proved hopelessly wrong. Herbert von Karajan conducted it in post-war Vienna and said Walton’s depiction of the fall of Babylon and the death of Belshazzar was “the best choral music that’s been written in the last 50 years”.
Hill says Beecham hadn’t realised that Walton’s style was the way that music was going. “It has great marches and an Edwardian swagger but is also has a sharp, rhythmic drive and jazz-infused writing that makes it a roller-coaster for all those performing and listening.” While Hill won’t have those two extra brass bands, he will have the full Yale Philharmonia – “a spectacular orchestra” – with brass parts integrated. The baritone soloist will be Yale School of Music alumnus David Pershall.
All Walton’s original scores (with the exception of Belshazzar’s Feast, which has been lost) are lodged in Yale’s Beinecke rare book and manuscript library, as are the works of the poet Walt Whitman, whose words provided the text for Charles Villiers Stanford’s Song to the Soul, which he wrote for Yale, but which – until now – Yale has never heard.
Stanford should have received an honorary doctorate from the university, and wrote the piece for the occasion, but the torpedoing of the Lusitania in 1915 – which presaged America’s entry into World War 1 – made an Atlantic crossing impossible, so the event was abandoned. The piece was rediscovered by musicologist Jeremy Dibble and recorded by The Bach Choir, London almost 100 years to the day after it was written – appropriately as Stanford was musical director of the choir from 1885 to 1902.