SIMON HEFFER HINTERLAND

Parry’s ‘Judith’, unheard for a century, heralds a stellar year for English music

Gratifying though it is to his admirers when an underappreciated composer has a big anniversary, and his works are put before the public for the first time in decades, once the celebrations are over the composer usually returns to near-oblivion. It won’t happen, of course, to Beethoven in 2021 (he is 250 next year) any more than it did to Wagner in 2014, the year after his bicentenary. But if you are not already internationally celebrated as a musical genius, well, good luck to you.

So it is a joy that one of the finest works by a composer feted last year – Hubert Parry, the centenary of whose death it was – is to have its first British performance since 1922. His oratorio Judith had its premiere in Birmingham in 1888, to great acclaim. Stanford conducted the London debut, and

Elgar played in the violins of the first performance at the Three Choirs Festival. However, like so many of Parry’s larger-scale works, it went out fashion after the Great War.

Delius joked that, had Parry not died when he did, he would have set the whole Bible to music. This oratorio represents quite a part of it. You almost certainly know one magnificent tune from it: the passage in Judith called Long Since in Egypt’s Plenteous Land, otherwise known as the hymn tune Repton, to the words Dear Lord and Father of Mankind. But the rest awaits discovery.

That Judith is to be performed in London – on April 3 at the Royal Festival Hall by the London Mozart Players and the Crouch End Festival Chorus – is the initiative of the man who will conduct it, William Vann. With four soloists of the highest calibre – the soprano Sarah Fox, mezzo-soprano Kathryn Rudge, tenor Toby Spence and bass-baritone Henry Waddington – Vann has done all he can to ensure the night is a success. As a taster, a clip of

Rudge singing the excerpt that became Repton is already on YouTube.

Judith is more than two hours long, and if you seek some sort of preview, rather than wading into the unknown, then help is at hand, also on YouTube. A Canadian musical outfit, the Pax Christi Chorale, was filmed performing Judith in Toronto in 2015. Those who have never heard Judith are sometimes tempted to say that it must have fallen out of the repertoire for good reasons – namely that it was turgid and boring. The excellent Toronto performance buries that notion.

This is a superb time for English music, a genre treated for so long with a cringe by our impresarios. The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s Isle of Noises season includes performances in the year ahead of Walton’s First Symphony and his Viola Concerto; Elgar’s Second Symphony, his Cello and Violin Concerti, his oratorio The Apostles and his orchestral masterpiece, Falstaff; Britten’s Violin

GORE BLIMEYJudith Beheading Holofernes (1617), by Artemisia Gentileschi