Music at St Paul's

The Chaplain’s View

The sole purpose of music in Church is the worship of God and therefore it is a form of prayer. At St Paul’s our Director of Music composes specific arrangements and settings to help us to express this during our services.

Excellence matters and so while we enjoy the wonderful contribution of the Ristretto singers, everyone is invited to engage with music during the service, offering their best to God.

What does that mean? In this context it means you don’t have to be a great singer to be part of a musical triumph that takes us to a higher plane and elevates us all toward the divine.

The Musical Director’s View

I was honoured to asked to take up the position of St Paul’s Director of Music in 2020 as I believe music in church worship is an offering to God, deserving the best resources that are available. Music is also an act of sharing – which includes listening together as well as singing together.

In Monaco we are lucky to have access to a wide range of talented professional performers through the ballet, opera and symphony orchestra, so our offering can range from hymns and simple congregational Mass settings to sacred works by composers from the Renaissance to the present day.

Click here for Errol's professional biography.

The Ristretto Singers

Formed by Errol Girdlestone in 2012 this group of professional and gifted amateur singers from across the region joins us regularly to lead music during worship.

The vocal ensemble is joined by instrumentalists on special occasions in the church’s calendar as well for performances of Masses by Haydn, Schubert and the renowned annual concert presentation of Handel’s Messiah.

Look out for a programme of music that profiles the church’s musical literature including Baroque composers and the resumption of the series of Bach’s cantatas and motets inaugurated prior to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Music for October

Sunday 5th 10.30am Holy Communion

Setting

Britten – Missa brevis / Gloria – Girdlestone

Hymn

631, 262, 358, 453

Motet

Regina coeli (Rheinberger)

Sunday 12th 10.30am Holy Communion

Setting

Batten – Short Service / Gloria – Merbecke

Hymn

739, 236, 649, 702

Motet

O nata lux (Tallis)

Sunday 19th 10.30am Holy Communion

Setting

Jonathan Dove – Missa Brevis

Hymn

394, 400, 462, 814

Motet

Ubi Caritas (David Briggs)

Sunday 26th 10.30am Holy Communion (St Michael & All Angels)

Setting

Byrd Mass for four voices / Gloria – Girdlestone

Hymn

290, 545, 537, 282

Motet

Come, Holy Ghost (Attwood)

Music Matters

Notre Dame de Lumière

The name aptly conjures up the atmosphere of our venue in deepest Provence, where the annual week-long Ristretto Summer Academy is held.

So, what exactly is the Academy all about?

Well, I could possibly respond by citing walks in the surrounding hills, adorned as they are with statues of the Madonna, shrines to Joan of Arc, and tiny historic chapels. Or indeed, simply lazing by the pool, enjoying dinner in the cloister, quaffing wine from the vineyard next door, and taking a picturesque drive through the myriad lavender and sunflower fields in the vicinity.

Actually, the above picture taken by Nick Birnie gets nearer to the heart of the matter – five hours per day of intensive rehearsal, involving a programme of demanding choral music, culminating in a concert given on the Saturday evening. Pictured above is the octagonal art-deco chapel where we rehearse, in the midst of what is now a hotel, but was previously a 17th century convent.

On the right is the overall view of the establishment as it stands today. The village itself consisting of a single street, dominated by the ancient convent, but including essentials such as a restaurant, a small supermarket, a post-office, and a winery. Best of all is the bus which takes you directly from Lumière to the station at Avignon, where you can catch the TGV/Eurostar to London. Most of our attendees coming from the UK, this is extremely advantageous.

We also welcome singers from Sweden, Germany, France, and even the USA and Canada, so our programmes embrace composers from many lands, languages, and periods. We have even tackled works in Russian, Swedish, and Danish, the most challenging of which was Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir, lasting over 40 minutes and extremely demanding musically, being sung in Russian of course.

Another huge challenge – and one of our deeply memorable experiences – was Figure Humaine by Francis Poulenc. Composed during 1943 under the Nazi occupation, the work could not be premiered in Paris because its text by Paul Eluard graphically mirrored the suffering of the French people, finally giving way to an explosion of hope and the ultimate triumph of freedom over tyranny, with the sopranos soaring to a stratospherically high E flat on the word “Liberté!” at the end.

Unable to receive its first performance in France, the work was premiered in English by the BBC Singers during 1945, the first performance in French being given in 1947. Somehow, the finger from above is always there to guide us, and Ristretto was invited by the Nice cultural authorities to perform the work in the Cathedral Sainte-Réparate two years later. The contract was signed in Spring 2016, not very long before the massacre on the Promenade des Anglais, which resulted in the deaths of 86 people, and the severe injuring of 450 others.

In the event, several survivors of the massacre managed to attend our concert, some of them in wheelchairs. In addition, a few members of the BBC Symphony Chorus joined us, intensifying (if that were at all possible) the poignancy of the occasion.

Getting back to this year’s Lumière, we tackled works by Verdi, Mendelssohn, Bruckner, Purcell, Gershwin, and yours truly – not to mention revisiting a movement from the previously mentioned Schnittke Concerto for Choir.

The concert at the end of the week was given in the adjoining Sanctuaire Note Dame de Lumière, whose crypt contains a magnificent wooden statue of the Virgin Mary, embossed with gold.

Errol Girdlestone BIOGRAPHY

Church music has been important to Errol all his life – you might even say it was in his genes! Errol’s family has strong theological, academic, musical and even medical connections that coalesce through music, so he was a boy chorister and trained initially as an organist.

Church music has provided the foundation for Errol’s rich and varied international career that has spanned many countries and an exciting range of genres, all featuring performances at the highest professional level. Here is a brief summary of the highlights:

Religious music – Royal College of Church Music, London Trinity College, Vicar Choral at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, Founder member of The Hilliard Ensemble.

Opera – English National Opera (Wagner’s Ring Cycle and EMI recordings with the legendary Reginald Goodall), conductor at the Nice Opera, Syrinx Concerts Orchestra in Vence and Monaco, Musique Cordiales in the Var, Festival Georges Auric in Montpellier. Plus, permanent posts in South Africa and Norway.

Freelance conductor and chorus master – Aix-en-Provence, Baden Baden, Cologne, Chicago, Montevideo, and the Wexford festival in Ireland.

Symphony and oratorio conductor – Leipzig, Vienna, the Bregenz Festival, Canterbury Festival, and at the Yehudi Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, alongside artists such as Giuliano Carmignola and Alison Balsom.

Commercial recordings – English National Opera, Pink Floyd.

Compositions – Concerto for two flutes and orchestra Pièce de Concert was premiered at the Louvre in Paris, while his Rivers of Time (scored for solo cello, symphony orchestra, and large chorus) was given at the Cathedral on the Rock in Monaco.

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