A Chorus for All Seasons Posted Mon 29 June 2026
If music be the food of love, sing on…
Those words have travelled a long way to reach this 134th RSNO Concert Season. Most of us who recognise the phrase attribute it to Shakespeare – to Duke Orsino’s lovesick opening gambit in Twelfth Night, where he demands an excess of music in the hope of curing his infatuation. But the line above was borrowed and modified in the seventeenth century by the poet Henry Heveningham, who turned the already famous words to an entirely different purpose: not ironic excess, but earnest adoration – a man undone, quite simply, by the sound of a singer. It was Heveningham’s poem that the composer Jean Belmont Ford set to music, and it was this setting the RSNO Chorus sang on our Budapest tour last autumn. To carry those words across Europe, and then to watch them thread their way through an entire Season’s music-making, feels like more than coincidence. A chorus that sings the food of love ought, perhaps, to know something about appetite.
And what has this past season asked of our appetite for singing? Almost everything, it turns out. Sacred polyphony and Sufi devotion. Baroque grandeur and cinematic spectacle. Ancient ritual and festive joy. A foreign city, a chilly Kirk, a concert hall filled with a thousand voices. The variety of musical landscape the Chorus has inhabited this Season would be remarkable in any year. As a chapter in the life of a single ensemble, it amounts to something close to a panorama of what choral music is all about.
Autumn: Opening Notes
The Season began, as the best Seasons do, with travel. A pre-tour concert at St Mary’s Cathedral, Glasgow, offered a tuning-up, if you will, of three works from three very different corners of the sacred choral tradition: Poulenc’s Gloria, Sir James MacMillan’s Divo Aloysio Sacrum, and Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Æterna. Successfully under our belts, we would, in a matter of weeks, carry these works to the Hungarian capital, secure in our repertoire for our concerts there. As I wrote in my blog post on that tour, to sing in the city of Liszt, Bartók and Kodály was to feel the weight of musical tradition all around us. At the Franz Liszt Academy of Music – gleaming in its Art Nouveau splendour, with acoustics that seemed to reward every note with interest – we performed Haydn’s Te Deum and Harmoniemesse with the MÁV Symphony Orchestra under Maestro Róbert Farkas. The Te Deum, written for Empress Maria Theresa, was Haydn at his most radiant; the Harmoniemesse, his final completed mass, spoke to us from somewhere deeper – a music of gratitude near the end of the composer’s long and fulfilled life. Then, at Matthias Church atop Buda Hill, the Poulenc and the Lauridsen found a perfect home: the Gloria‘s vivid contrasts of exuberance and humility matched perfectly against the jewel-like mosaics and Gothic spires of one of Budapest’s most iconic sanctuaries.
(c) David Miller
We left Hungary, as I noted at the time, with something more than memories of applause; more a renewed sense of why we sing at all.
Winter: Sacred and Festive
Autumn’s sacred emphasis gave way, in November and December, to the two faces of winter: the profound and the celebratory. Mozart’s Mass in C minor – one of the greatest of all unfinished things, left incomplete yet somehow complete in its ambition – was performed in Glasgow and Edinburgh under Thomas Søndergård, with a quartet of soloists that brought the music’s extraordinary demands fully to life: Brenda Rae, Katie Coventry, Edgardo Rocha, and Andreas Landin. Mozart conceived this Mass not as a liturgical commission but as a personal offering, and the intensity of its choral writing reflects that private urgency. The Qui tollis, for double chorus, is as searching as anything he wrote.
(c) David Miller
December offered a different kind of music-making entirely. Home Alone in Concert – the film accompanied by the RSNO under Ben Palmer – brought Christmas to the Royal Concert Hall in its most warmly familiar form, courtesy of John Williams’ beautiful score. Then came our own Christmas Concerts in Dundee and Glasgow, conducted by Chorus Director Stephen Doughty and featuring Josie Long as narrator, alongside the singers of our Chorus Academies in Glasgow and Dundee. These evenings belong to a different register from the sacred repertoire of Budapest or the coming months, but they matter no less for that. Music-making rooted in festivity and shared delight has its own integrity, and there is something particularly moving about watching singers of every level of experience find their place in the same chorus, united by nothing more complicated than the desire to sing.
(c) David Miller
The Turning of the Year
The new year brought our annual Messiah. As I explored in my earlier blog post Hoops, Swords and Hallelujahs, the Chorus’s relationship with Handel’s oratorio goes back to the very founding of the ensemble. The Glasgow Choral Union – as the Chorus was then known – was established in 1843 with the express purpose of giving Scotland its first complete performance of this work. Nearly two centuries on, that founding impulse is still audible. This year, with Laurence Cummings – Music Director of the Academy of Ancient Music and a peerless Handelian – on the podium, and soloists Anna Devin, Claudia Huckle, Nick Pritchard and George Humphries, the familiar became fresh again. That capacity for renewal is, I think, Messiah’s deepest gift to those who sing it across a lifetime.
A fortnight later, in a quite different spirit, nearly a thousand singers descended on the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall for the Come and Sing Carmina Burana. As I wrote in Why We Sing Together, these events distil choral music-making to its most elemental and joyful form: strangers arriving in the morning, musical family by the afternoon. The scale of this year’s gathering – choristers travelling from across Scotland, and from as far afield as Tipperary, North Carolina, and Romania – was a reminder that communal singing is not a niche pursuit but a universal impulse. Carl Orff’s great wheel of fortune, with its visceral rhythms and theatrical energy, is ideally suited to voices massed in their hundreds. There is a particular exhilaration in being one voice in a thousand, all of us breathing together, all of us part of something that no single voice could achieve. As Stephen Doughty brought the final bars into focus, the hall seemed almost electrically charged with shared achievement.
Spring: Into Unfamiliar Territory
March brought the season’s emotional centrepiece. The performances of Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil at Greyfriars Kirk in Edinburgh and St Aloysius’ Church in Glasgow carried, for me at least, a personal weight I explored at length elsewhere. In 1993, working at Glasgow’s Mayfest festival, I helped programme the Glinka State Choir of St Petersburg in a performance of this very work at St Aloysius that left its mark permanently on my inner choral life. Thirty-three years later, I stood in the same church not as a festival programmer in the audience, but as a member of the chorus giving the music its shape. A choral life, as I reflected before, has its own long arcs.
What the Vigil asked of the Chorus – and what it asks every ensemble that takes it on – is a willingness to inhabit something genuinely foreign. Its ancient znamenny chant melodies, its modal harmonies, its liturgical weight: none of this belongs naturally to the Western choral tradition. And yet the music travels, as I noted in that earlier post, not by assimilation but by resistance. It expands the tradition rather than being absorbed by it.
(c) Claire Bryan
That encounter with the musically unfamiliar extended further still, in late April, with the Orchestral Qawwali Project – a collaboration with director Rushil Ranjan and the extraordinary Abi Sampa. Qawwali, the Sufi devotional music of South Asia, carries a spiritual intensity that is all its own: music designed not simply to express devotion but to generate it, to use rhythm and repetition and ecstatic collective sound as a vehicle for something beyond the notes. For a chorus formed in the European classical tradition, to find a place within that sonic and spiritual world was both humbling and enlarging. The Season had already taken us from Russian Orthodoxy to Hungarian Catholicism to Viennese sacred classicism. This was something else again – and no less moving for it.
Gladiator in Concert, performed in mid-March, offered a very different kind of intensity. Hans Zimmer’s score for Ridley Scott’s epic is choral music in the service of pure narrative and emotional viscera. The Latin texts, the ceremonial weight of the choral writing, the spectacle of film and orchestra and voices combined – this is a world away from the Vigil or the Qawwali Project, and yet it belongs to the same fundamental impulse: sound in the service of something larger than itself.
The Orchestral Qawwali Project
Summer: Ode to the Joy of Singing
And so to June, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. If there is a work that summarises, in a single arc, everything the Season has explored – the sacred and the secular, the intimate and the monumental, the individual voice and the collective roar – it is this. The choral finale, setting Schiller’s Ode to Joy with a directness that still startles after two centuries, is the most unambiguous statement in the repertoire of what singing together, in community, can mean.
RSNO Season Finale
With Patrick Hahn conducting the RSNO, and soloists Eleanor Dennis, Karen Cargill, Joshua Ellicott and Andrew Hamilton, the Chorus brought this extraordinary Season to its close. Beethoven wrote the Ninth while deaf, hearing it only in imagination – and then, at the premiere in 1824, had to be turned to face the audience by a soloist so that he could see, if not hear, the reception. There is something in that image – a man brought to the music by others, turned towards the human warmth he could not quite reach on his own – that feels, this Season, like an apt and moving metaphor for choral singing itself.
We are, in the end, always turning each other towards the music.
If music be the food of love, sing on.