Feeding the Spirit and the Mind at the Summer Festival of Sacred Music

England's Coventry Cathedral is best known in the history of 20th-century music as the bombed ruin whose restoration inspired the creation of the Benjamin Britten masterpiece "War Requiem." But other pieces were commissioned for this miraculous architectural project, including the "Missa Brevis" of Sir William Walton, which was featured Sunday at the Summer Festival of Sacred Music at St. Bartholomew's Church.

The series presents a different view of the Mass each Sunday and allows a critic the opportunity to review the performance without intruding onto the ceremonial liturgical service itself. Each week there is a clear line of demarcation drawn between the featured work, presented by the St. Bart's choir a cappella, with organ accompaniment or sometimes with a small orchestra in attendance, and the music utilized for the ongoing celebration of the Mass, hymns, processionals, etcetera. On a summer Sunday, a visit to St. Bart's yields not only spiritual, but also intellectual stimulation.

To an American, Walton might seem a strange choice for a sacred music concert. Although, like Britten, Walton was a boy chorister, he was not an assiduous student, dropping out of Oxford to join the incipient avant-garde movement of the early 1920s. Walton became famous for his collaboration with the Sitwell family in a work called "Façade." A jazzy, irreverent score was coupled with Edith Sitwell's reciting of her absurd poetry — through a curtain of painted lips — via a megaphone.

The separation of church and state is not, pardon the pun, a sacred concept in England. In fact, the opposite is much closer to common practice. Although Walton's output for the church is small per se, his music in general is supremely patriotic, glorifying his nation and its individual rulers. At Sunday's concert, the closing organ piece, a transcription of "Crown Imperial," written for the coronation of George VI in 1937, seemed not only sacred in style, but also appropriate in content.

The music this day was indeed a combination of the sacred and, if not the profane, at least the secular. Eschewing the normal organ prelude, the music department opened the festivities with excerpts from Walton's score to Laurence Olivier's "Richard III." Of particular note were the extremely dark Passacaglia and, of course, the inspiring March. The final extended chord became the de facto pedal point for the commencement of the processional hymn.

"Missa Brevis" itself is a strange work, as Walton is the iconoclast inhabiting a sound world of futuristic dimensions and unfamiliar rules. Although a Christian work, it recalled a Jewish composer, Leonard Bernstein, whose explorations into the sacerdotal often traveled a similar overgrown path. The St. Bart's choristers did a fine job of navigating these difficult intervals and often listeners needed to accept on faith that the notes that they were singing were the correct ones. Certainly the Gloria makes one sit up and take notice.

The chorus physically split for the Sanctus and Benedictus, half on each side of the stage. In the best tradition of these more mysterious Mass movements, the sounds — especially the word "holy" repeated often — were inventively otherworldly. The Hosanna burst onto the vocal scene as if an interruption. Walton paints a truly unknowable other world with consummate skill.

Also on the program were anthems by the same composer, and the disembodied phrases of "Jubilate Deo" were both jarring and haunting. William Walton is not well known on this side of the pond, so special praise should go to the men and women of this adventurous summer music series.