During the 1950s I was invited by Mary Barran to go and sing a few times at her family home of Madehurst near Arundel for a week in the Summer. It was quite folky, with Country Dancing on the lawn, a washing-up rota, and singing three times a day. Not a great standard, but Mary had somehow inveigled the young and charismatic Colin Davis to conduct us, with his lovely (first) wife April Cantelo helping along.

We sang 16th and 17th century polyphonic repertoire, and one piece stood out for me like a lighthouse. It was Heinrich Schütz’s Viel werden kommen, from the 1648 collection of Motets. I’d never heard of Schütz, but this single piece set me off on a 20 year love affair with his music. I found that his entire output was in print, thanks to the German publisher Bärenreiter, so access was surprisingly simple.

When my musical friends got together of an evening (that is when I wasn’t out playing my violin in quartets or orchestras, or singing in other choirs) we would try over many of Schütz’s marvellous 4, 5 and 6 part motets.

By 1962, still working at OUP in London, I felt like making a statement about this almost unknown major composer. Bringing together all my singing friends, and some excellent professional soloists and string players that I knew, I boldly booked the church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield in March to give a whole concert of Schütz. This was really a direct imitation of Paul Steinitz’s highly-regarded Bach Society concerts in the same place. In fact for a while we even called ourselves the Heinrich Schütz Society. Paul was a friend and he didn’t seem to mind our cheek.

We must have done some good publicity, because the church was surprisingly  full and many critics came. This unknown composer with the weird name (when some people tried to pronounce it, overdoing the umlaut, it could sound rather rude) was suddenly being talked about, and the evening became an “event”. The reviews were unexpectedly lengthy, flattering and serious. A delightful shock for our little escapade to be taken so seriously.

Unable to follow up this success, because I was just off to East Africa for several months on business, I did some thinking and decided to continue with the choir when I returned in the Autumn. It was just the time when I was realising that I really wanted to change my life. Coming back from Africa I in fact resigned from OUP and overnight became a professional musician, with no qualifications and no work. At least I could be the unpaid conductor of an amateur choir. It was a start.

For the next ten years we gave 3 or 4 concerts a season, at first in the church of St Andrew by the Wardrobe, and later in the beautiful Wren church of St Stephen Wallbrook, next to the Mansion House in the City. In the basement Chad Varah founded and ran his amazing Samaritans. He was musical and liked having us there. He also encouraged my idea of allowing applause in a church, something which was unheard of at the time. I had been shocked myself to hear it for first in Italy, but thought it right and agreeably human. It is normal everywhere now.

The Choir was run by a very efficient committee of the singers: A Treasurer, four Fixers, one for each voice line, a Publicist, and a Print Manager.

We sang over a hundred works of Schütz, and of course other pieces by Gabrieli, Monteverdi, Steffani, Purcell, De Lalande, and many others. Always the less well-known 17th century rather than the better-known 16th.  this involved creating a new style of performance. The polyphonic era was familiar to us all, but from 1600 the “Seconda Prattica” came in: more personal, more dramatic, in some sense more secular. It also involved several much less-well-known instruments: the Cornettino, the Sackbut, a consort of Viols, the  Baroque Violin, and so on.

This was the time (1960s) when quite a few inquisitive and intelligent musicians were discovering historical instruments, and I began to wonder what would happen if one day we eventually tried 18th, as well as 17th century music, in a historical way. We were fortunate to be offered a recording contract with Argo, and we made many worthwhile discs of major and minor works of Schütz.

After a few years I formed a professional formation which we called the Schütz Choir of london. With this group, managed by the bass singer Terry Edwards, we could tour abroad and undertake larger-scale performances.  Sometimes the two formations worked together, such as in a major invitation to Leuven in 1972 for the Flanders Festival. Five different Schütz programmes in five days was our way of marking the Centenary of his death. In that year we also gave Schütz Festivals in Lisbon and London.  We gave a beautiful Centenary Concert in Holy Trinity Brompton with Peter Pears and other fine soloists. It was the Schwannengesang for the amateur choir. Busy now with a rapidly developing career, it was time for me to wind up the amateurs. There were a lot of rueful faces when I made the announcement; it’s true that they had sung wonderfully for a decade, and I owed them a lot.

By 1985 it was another Schütz Centenary, this time of his birth. Among other events a small group of the SCL and instrumentalists set off for a tour of East Germany with the Musikalische Exequien as the centrepiece. We were paid in Ostmarks, worth almost nothing, but had a fascinating time behind the Iron Curtain, in Berlin, Weimar, Dresden and other centres. On The Birthday we were driving along in our coach when I looked at the map and realised we were 5 miles from Schütz’s birthplace. We quickly diverted to the little village and sang spontaneously in front of his monument. A golden moment. The whole tour was an extraordinary experience, being behind the Iron Curtain, sharing elevators with Russian officers, visiting Liszt’s house, drinking Russian champagne for breakfast, buying music,- trying to spend Ostmarks in Ostland. Finally singing in the rebuilt Semper Opera in Dresden (though much of the rest of the city, including the Frauenkirche, was still rubble.) Kay and I were due in NewYork straight after. The shock of arriving in the bright lights of Frankfurt on our way was considerable, and New York scarcely credible.

Now, with the SCL and the flourishing London Classical Players, we did finally move into the 18th century. Notable concerts were a Matthew Passion in absolute contrast to the London Bach Choir’s annual very slow morning and afternoon outing (which one critic had nicknamed “The Conservative Party at Prayer”). Ours was historically small-scale and fleet of tempo, with soloists coming from the choir, and separation of the two choirs right across the church of St Andrew’s Holborn. And we gave an even smaller John Passion with boys voices and original instruments back in St Bartholomews, where at least seven interested conductors had bought seats! Then there was a scintillating first historical Messiah in Handel’s church in Hanover Square, and finally the approach to the Classical period with Haydn’s Creation; A “new created world” indeed!

After that the SCL appeared more rarely, as I became involved in orchestral guesting in many parts of the world. But now and then I had the pleasure of seeing all my friends, and new ones, again for recordings of Mozart and Beethoven, and Brahms with the LCP.

Great memories…