PADRE PIO: THE COMPOSERS TALK ABOUT THEIR WORK

Rick Jones talks to the composers and reveals how Padre Pio’s prayer inspired their work

In the 40 years since Padre Pio died, and the six since he was canonised by Pope John Paul II in June 2002, the saint has continued to attract followers. He is venerated from Chicago to Shanghai and it is said that today more Italians pray to Padre Pio than to the Virgin Mary. He is already one of the most popular saints in church history.

Francesco Forgione was born the son of a shepherd in 1887 in southern Italy. He was certain of his calling from an early age and experienced visions when still a boy. He took orders at 15, had frequent mystic and ecstatic experiences and in 1918 at the age of 30 received the stigmata, mysterious wounds in his hands, feet and side matching Christ's. At around this time, Padre Pio wrote the long post-communion prayer Stay with me Lord which he uttered daily for the rest of his life. Two years ago, the Genesis Foundation commissioned three composers to set the prayer to such music as a good parish choir could sing. The first performances of these compositions are the purpose of tonight's concert.

In fact it was the composer Roxana Panufnik who first proposed the idea of a choral version of Padre Pio's prayer. She had been moved by the 'introvert, very ardent, very passionate' words at a funeral. To her they were a deep expression of the fear and loneliness of one in search of reassurance and strength in the face of death. Her version is for double choir and organ, the opposing forces delivering Pio's words as if in conversation across the stalls.

Like a baroque composer Panufnik has borrowed from herself to conclude the work. Her Amen is taken from the Gloria of her Westminster Mass which she wrote for Cardinal Basil Hume a decade ago. The work was the first Genesis commission, which makes the borrowing apt.
Panufnik was first inspired by Pio's prayer in a translation by Cecil Humphery-Smith who suffered serious head injuries in a car crash travelling through Italy some years ago. A friend set out to send a telegram to Padre Pio but even before he had sent it, he received a reply saying Humphery-Smith would recover. Thereafter the translator acquired as a memento a patch of cloth from the saint's vestments, a piece of which he cut off and sent to Panufnik who placed it on her piano during composition.

Fellow-commissionee James MacMillan also tells of a miracle attributed to the saint in the story of a sick Glaswegian girl given hours to live. A stranger came by who happened to have in his possession a Padre Pio relic, a small cutting from the saint's cassock. This was placed on the girl's forehead, Pio's prayer was said and the girl revived.

Like Panufnik, MacMillan too was struck by the prayer's sense of impending death and the 'universal concern' of how each, 'in the grip of his own conscience', will overcome it. He notices similarities with Cardinal Newman's epic poem The Dream of Gerontius which wrestles with the terrifying loneliness of a dying man's final moments. His interpretation, MacMillan says, makes a spiritual journey through different emotional states in the course of its six minutes, describing it as a 'dramatic work reaching a climax at the essential core of meaning in the text'.

The prayer, filleted down to its essentials, is set for four-part choir plus organ, a feature of which are anchoring drones. The choral writing is part homophonic, part polyphonic, part slabs-of-sound, but never so complex that the text is obscured. Structure derives from little motivic cells which provide melodic interest, 'products', MacMillan says, 'of the fevered imaginings of my brain'.

Composer Will Todd meanwhile imagined his interpretation not for organ but for piano and choir. Gentle triplets impart a sense of serenity to Padre Pio's prayer-filled night. Todd was struck by the intensity of expression in the text, its beseeching quality with its repetitive pleading refrain 'stay with me', its resignation towards the inevitable and its recognition of the need for a saviour in the darkness which allows no release.

With his librettist and regular collaborator Ben Dunwell, Todd divided the prayer into three verses split by two interludes which gives the piece symmetry and the choir breathing space. Four parts are required though much of the time the singers are in unison or simple two parts gently rocking between chords of A flat major and F minor. Todd has written his post-communion anthem very much with the choir of modest means and limited capabilities in mind. The basses' bottom C is clearly marked 'optional'. The constraint of writing simple music for a choir as virtuosic as The Sixteen was a demand, he feels, which sharply focused the creative process.

A choir as virtuosic as the Westminster Cathedral Choir contrasts these three latterday commissions with unaccompanied works from the first half of the 16th century. Tallis' Sancte Deus is a four-part votive antiphon composed before 1540 when the Latin rite was outlawed. The words are taken both from the Good Friday improperia (Holy God, holy and strong...) and the Matins of the dead. John Sheppard set the words In Manus Tuas (Into thy hands I commend my spirit) three times, all performed here. There is no cowering fear or quaking horror of the darkness of the tomb in Sheppard's glorious polyphony, but every reason to believe that the composer was looking forward to eternity with absolute confidence.