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Bach as you’ve never heard him before
THE Reverend Lyndon van der Pump is a clergyman with a difference. Born in Swansea in 1925, he had a distinguished career as a Lieder recitalist before discovering a talent for teaching. After teaching singing to actors at RADA and choral scholars at Cambridge, he was invited to become Singing Professor at the Royal College of Music, where he worked from1971 to 1994. But rather than simply resting on his musical laurels, he decided to follow a long-time religious commitment by becoming an Anglican priest in 1988.
His career as a clergyman was spent at St Mary’s Primrose Hill, from where he retired in 2004. Its most famous vicar, Percy Dearmer, had pioneered the modern Anglo-Catholic liturgy as well as writing the words of many famous hymns. Dearmer had also recruited Ralph Vaughan Williams, before he had ever composed a hymn, as the musical editor of The English Hymnal. Van der Pump still lives near St Mary’s.
His passion, as a singer and teacher, has always been to make the words tell in the way the composers intended: as inseparable partners of the music. English composers, from Byrd and Purcell to Vaughan Williams and Britten, provide many fine examples of this. Works sung in translation, however, have often had their words forced into unnatural patterns, while the standard English texts of Haydn’s Creation and Mendelssohn’s Elijah are lamentably quaint.
Van der Pump recently turned his attention to perhaps the greatest of all works of music – JS Bach’s St Matthew Passion. This sublime favourite with choirs is very often sung in English outside Germany. Standard English translations are either stilted or married inelegantly with the music. Van der Pump’s new translation, issued by the leading music publishers Peters, is characterised by being flowing, idiomatic and singable.
His aim has been to produce a translation that is literally accurate in translating the original German while fitting the English words to the notes. There are conscious echoes of a variety of modern translations of St Matthew’s Gospel, as well as occasional whiffs of the Authorised Version, but the whole also has its own identity as a work of real literary merit.
The world première of this new translation will be given next Wednesday, 12 March, in St John’s Smith Square in a performance by the Camden Choir, conducted by Julian Williamson. A number of the distinguished soloists are van der Pump’s ex-pupils.
MARTIN SHEPPARD
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