How do you celebrate the life and work of a wildly prolific composer with just one concert? Representatives of the many hundreds who had sung and played for Ronald Corp had a jolly good try with a concert at the Cadogan Hall on June 23.
Presented by Petroc Trelawny, eleven key works by Ronald Corp were performed by the ensembles he had founded and led – Highgate Choral Society, The London Chorus, the New London Orchestra, and the New London Children’s Choir Alumni – under the direction of his favourite conductors: Dame Jane Glover, Sam Evans, Ian MacGregor, and William Vann, with baritone Marcus Farnsworth in the solo roles.
The effect of these disparate works was variegated: if two of them echoed the style of William Walton, that was only to do it better than Walton had ever done, unfettered fun being Ron’s hallmark in his evocations of London and provincial English life.
Two of those 11 works – both sung by the Highgate Choral Society – were outstanding. The diminutive Missa San Marco is a sunlit idyll, its major-mode diatonic sweetness guaranteed to warm the heart. And Corp’s First World War cantata And All the Trumpets Sounded – of which more later – put down his marker for eternity.
But who was this man, some may ask. The first publication to register his death at 74, and with a typically gushing headline, was the Sun: ‘A beloved music star who performed for millions.’ For all those who have sung under his inspiring direction, or listened to his intricate chamber music, this populist accolade may have come as a surprise.
But it shouldn’t have done, because scarcely a day goes by without one of Ronald Corp’s compositions or arrangements being broadcast on the radio. Most of these have been recorded for the Hyperion label by him and the ensemble he created and ran – the New London Orchestra – or by The London Chorus, an elite choir of which he was music director. All this served his mission, which was partly to get his own compositions launched, and partly to breathe new life into a wealth of little-known – mostly British – music from the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Never was an OBE better earned.
Corp was a musical polymath, combining the instincts of a showman with the seriousness of a professional musicologist. And what made him unique among composer-conductors was the fact that he was also a champion of amateur music-making, as brilliantly exemplified by his work in North London.
In 1991 he founded the New London Children’s Choir, who became stars in their own right, appearing in major London concert halls with symphony orchestras, frequently performing at the Proms, and making film soundtrack and TV recordings, including the soundtrack for Star Wars: Episode 1.
And for 41 years Ron ran the venerable, 180-member Highgate Choral Society, who in addition to their regular concerts in All Hallows Church, Gospel Oak, perform far and wide.
Many residents of Hampstead will have had their lives touched by Ron, either as child singers, or adult singers, or as part of the audience in All Hallows Church, or at the HCS’s charming Christmas carol services – with recherché European peasant gems alternating with everyone singing ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ and Ron presiding like a genial uncle – in St Michael’s church.
But the way this charismatic conductor – and prolific composer – emerged was typically unorthodox. ‘Because my family knew nothing about music,’ he told me, ‘I’ve always been on this journey of musical discovery. And I’ve always wanted to share what I discover. I wanted to be a composer from the start – I wanted to be Tchaikovsky. I created my own manuscript paper with five pen-nibs glued together, and devised my own system of notation – all little squiggles and signs. From ten onwards I used to write a piece every day. I’d feel a day was wasted if I hadn’t written something – and I still feel like that today.’
And that facility never deserted him. During the pandemic he realised that he had up his sleeve the basic structure of a symphony, so he orchestrated it. ‘And then a third symphony came out, very quickly. I knew immediately how it was going to begin, and what its sound-world would be like. It just came. So I wrote two symphonies during lockdown! I’m now trying to get performances of them, as they haven’t been heard – and I wanted to hear them myself.’
He began his career as a tenor in the choir of Christ Church, Oxford, but was a born leader from the start. While working at the BBC he founded a staff choir, conducted the BBC Singers, and started making recordings with them. In 1984 he took over the Highgate Choral Society, and a year later began running the London Chorus, and thereafter never looked back.
His taste in repertory was healthily eclectic, and he was always keen to commission new young composers; his own music was eminently singable, spurred on by his conviction that accessibility should be a guiding principle.
As a member of HCS I can vouch for the enthusiastic intensity with which he infused every rehearsal of that choir, a fair proportion of whom are seriously good musicians. He had unusual grace as a conductor, and a rapier wit; his musicological pre-concert talks were models of their kind.
And he never lost sight of the fact that this was a community choir, born out of an ordinary evening class, and was essentially a group of friends with him as the anchor. His aim at the end of each rehearsal was to send people out on a high, and vowing to do even better next time.
Every summer the choir meets for a party at which anyone who wants can get up on stage and do a turn. One of the most polished performances on these occasions was always a song by Ron, usually raunchy to a shocking degree. When bass Sherman Carroll and soprano Marie-Claude Gervais met in the choir and fell in love, it was no surprise who tied the knot: ‘Ron married us,’ says Marie-Claire.
But for Ron this was simply par for the course, thanks to a detail I have not yet mentioned. In addition to everything else, Ron Corp was also an ordained priest, regularly saying Mass and delivering sermons at the Anglo-Catholic Church of St Alban the Martyr in Holborn.
‘I know I’m lucky,’ he once said. ‘In church and on the podium I do two things I really love. I sometimes think I should do something different after all these years, but I just love taking rehearsals. And though we’re working hard, we’re also having fun.’
But one question always nagged at him. He may have been the broadcasters’ favourite, but in the average concert-goer’s mind he just didn’t figure. Yet listening again to And All the Trumpets Sounded, it’s plain as a pikestaff that this is a magnificent piece. Ron’s libretto starts by quoting Bunyan, but after some searing verses from the 13th century Dies Irae it moves to the English Poets of the First World War – plus the American Civil War as portrayed by Walt Whitman – to build up a chillingly vivid picture of life and death in the trenches. The work’s sound-world counters bugle calls with trumpet fanfares, and through vigorous use of side-drums the score contrives to suggest the rattle of fire and the lethal collisions of cold steel and vulnerable flesh. The emotional climax of the work is a profoundly moving monologue as the living protagonist addresses the corpse of a young man side by side with whom he has been fighting valiantly.
The onomatopoeic score is hugely demanding to sing, with atonal leaps and irregular tempi which can change with every bar. But having been prepared by Sam Evans, and conducted on the day by Jane Glover, the combined forces of the HCS, the TLC, and the NLO, gave electrifying performance.
Chatting one day about the paucity of suitable repertoire for ambitious groups to perform, he made a revealing remark. ‘Where,’ he asked, ‘is the next War Requiem [by Britten], or the next Child of Our Time [by Tippett] – something gritty and significant – coming from?’ Had he lived a bit longer, the answer might well have been ‘from yourself, Ronald Corp’. All the Trumpets is full of fire, thunder, and delicate hints of Puccini and Britten, while Ron’s powerful final work – a cantata setting of a series of letters from a Jewish prisoner in Auschwitz – suggested that he was moving in the direction of greatness. He now belongs in that hall of fame.
And he’s still springing posthumous surprises. His song cycle Hail and Farewell – in which he mourns the sudden passing of the choir’s much-loved manager – has only had one performance so far, as the opening work of the Three Choirs Festival in 2023. That concert will now be broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday 13 July, sometime between 1300-1600 hrs.