Rejoice in the Lamb - Benjamin Britten | The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge

''Rejoice in the Lamb" Music by Benjamin Britten Text by Christopher Smart The Choir of St John's College, Cambridge Ingrid Birchall, treble Matthew Monaghan, countertenor William Collison, tenor John Moore, bass Alexander Robson, organ Christopher Gray, conductor Production by www.classicalfilms.co.uk Director and camera operator - David Hinitt Producer - Adrian Peacock Filmed in Ely Cathedral, July 2025 ------- Programme note by Christopher Gray, Director of Music: Benjamin Britten composed his festival cantata, ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’, in 1943. It was commissioned by the Reverend Walter Hussey to mark the 50th anniversary of St Matthew’s Church, Northampton. The text is by Christopher Smart who was in what we would now call a psychiatric hospital when he wrote his poem ‘Jubilate Agno’, in around 1760. Britten draws from the 1,200 lines to make a more concise text that captures Smart’s love of God and of the natural world; in essence, how he sees something of the Creator in the created. In the treble solo, ‘For I will consider my cat, Jeoffry’, Smart observes his beloved cat performing his morning ritual, ‘wreathing his body seven times round, with elegant quickness’ – just as God intended. The feline organ writing purrs, pounces, and strokes the listener’s leg with its tail, while the treble soloist is given the words of Christopher Smart as he observes the ritual. There is an alto solo about a mouse ‘of great personal valour’; and a tenor soloist sings of the flowers as ‘great blessings’ and ‘the poetry of Christ’. The darkest part of the work comes in the central section, when Smart describes what appears to have been violent maltreatment at the hands of the 18th century hospital guards, with the euphemism ‘for the officers of the peace are at variance with me’. Smart compares this to Jesus’s suffering: ‘For I am under the same accusation with my saviour’. Britten’s music here is terrifying, and at ‘the watchman smites me with his staff’, he engineers a huge climax on an E flat minor chord that jars with the short movement’s overall tonality of E minor. Ultimately, the heat dissipates and Smart holds that 'he that was born of a virgin shall deliver me out of all'. The oil of faith having calmed Smart's troubled waters, the bass soloist now extols some letters of the alphabet in ‘For H is a spirit’, perhaps recognising that more abstract things are also a product of God’s creation. Staying with the abstract, Britten then has an opportunity to show his compositional dexterity with an inspired response to some rhyming nonsense words about musical instruments. The work opens with 'Rejoice in God, O ye tongues', a three-page movement in which the entire choir is mostly on the same note, middle C. This is a universal pitch that is within range for all voices, and the coming together portrays the ‘nations and languages and every creature in which is the breath of life’ uniting to worship God. The note is unharmonised at first, as if chords have not yet evolved in this cosmic opening. Short splashes of harmony appear in the organ part as musical life climbs out of the primordial unison. Then, in 'Let Nimrod the mighty hunter', there is a parade of obscure Old Testament figures, complete with associated symbols, bringing their praise to God. A graceful Purcellian ‘Hallelujah’ movement follows, which Britten brings back a second time to end the work in quiet ecstasy.