Review of BBC Radio 3 Choral Evensong live broadcast of Richard Causton's 'Cradle Song' (Broadcast Wednesday 18 January) from Winchester Cathedral

Choirbook for The Queen Review by Bridget Nichols, Chaplain to the Bishop of Ely.


20 January 2012

Winchester Cathedral has inaugurated the Choirbook for The Queen with a performance of Richard Causton's  setting of the sixteenth-century Scottish religious poet James Wedderburn's 'Balulalow'. This deceptively simple lyric has been set by a number of composers and has an established place in the Christmas repertoire as a lullaby to the Christ Child. It is more than fitting in the season of Epiphany. 

Causton captures the gentle singing to sleep that fades to the gentlest notes, but his setting also discovers and gives musical form to the intense personal devotion of Wedderburn's words:

O my dear heart young Jesu sweet

Prepare thy creddil in my spreit [prepare thy cradle in my spirit]

And I shall rock thee in my heart

And never mair from thee depart.

The close integration of voices in the initial greeting to Jesus gives way almost immediately to soaring treble notes reaching out to invite the infant God into the very centre of a human life. Both yearning and humility can be heard here, all the more poignantly because they venture out above the reassuring steadiness of the lower voices, connected, but also momentarily isolated. Perhaps there is a sense in which this call is itself cradled like the infant Jesus in the weave of the notes below it.

So far, so childlike and trusting. Yet, like much devotional poetry, Wedderburn's words have more than one affective level. The lullaby is also a love song, and Causton's setting evokes the risk-taking of the human heart that offers itself as a place of shelter and protection for God. It is committing itself to a lifetime of devotion, with great tenderness and with an almost disconcerting emotional exposure. There is an element of challenge to the hearers to look inward for the Christ-shaped places in their own hearts.

The texture of the setting of the second stanza is denser and more confident, as the mood changes from the personal profession of love, to a promise of worship:

But I shall praise thee evermore

With songis sweet unto thy gloir [glory]

The knees of my heart shall I bow

And sing that richt balulalow.

This is focused and unanimous adoration that gets to grips with the extraordinary biblical metaphor of bending the knees of the heart. Kneeling is a gesture offered to kings and implicitly recognises the kingship of Christ revealed in the incarnation. It is also the most ordinary way of being at the right level to gaze into a low cradle, and I was taken completely by surprise as the lullaby refrain, 'Balulalow' (apparently 'Lullaby, little lamb') resumed, faded almost to nothing, and made a final return. 

Causton has beautifully and subtly explored the almost mystical character of the lyric as an act of homage and a profound form of self-examination.