He is not here: composer Oliver Tarney introduces his St Mark Passion with its highlighting of voices that we do not normally hear from

Preparing for the premiere of Oliver Tarney's St Mark Passion at St Endellion in 2019

Oliver Tarney's St Mark Passion was commissioned by the St Endellion Easter Festival and given its first performance there in 2019. Using a libretto by Lucia Quinault, the work combines the Passion narrative with many of the parables and miracles from the Gospel. The work is being performed on 28 March 2026 in Pugin’s St Cuthbert's Chapel at Ushaw Historic House in Durham by the Durham Singers and the Durham Singers Camerata with soloists Julian Close, Paul Grant, Darwin Prakash, Sam Utley, Nicholas Morris, Katy Thomson and Beth Moxon, in a semi-staging directed by Donna Stirrup. [Further details]

Oliver chose St Mark's Gospel party because it is the earliest gospel. He was interested in getting closer to the original sources, and did so also by including texts outside the Passion story itself. This was something Oliver did in his Magnificat, his 2014 work for chorus and orchestra, recorded on Convivium Records [see my review] which interleaves the text of the Magnificat, in Latin, from the Gospel of St. Luke with texts from The Book of Mary - Surat Maryam (from the Qur'an), The Infancy Gospel of James and The Song of Hannah (I Samuel: 2). 

There is also the fact that St Mark's Gospel originally ended without the Resurrection, finishing simply with the women fleeing from the tomb and the conclusion of the Gospel that we know was added later. Additionally, St Mark's Gospel is very concise and at one time it was thought to be a later paraphrase of an earlier text. And Oliver was attracted to the depiction of Jesus in the Gospel where he is impatient and a bit irascible, chastising the disciples for not getting what he is on about. There is a real urgency to the narrative which drew Oliver to it. And it has rather been overlooked when it comes to passion settings, with not so many famous ones.

St Cuthberts Chapel, Ushaw where Oliver Tarney's St Mark Passion will be performed on 28 March 2026

In his Magnificat, Oliver used the additional texts to bring in aspects of the story not in the Magnificat text, to round out the story and include different viewpoints. He wanted to do something similar for the St Mark Passion, and the libretto created by Lucia Quinault brings greater context by interpolating settings of the parables. The Passion begins with the Parable of the Sower, which can be read as Christ being the seed. With the Parable of the Vineyard which is included later in the Passion, Oliver sees this as a lens through which to apprehend the crucifixion. The whole of St Mark's Gospel has explicit crucifixion predictions. This is the theme of the Gospel: Christ predicts, but his disciples cannot hear it. By including the Parable of the Vineyard, Oliver and Lucia could point to what was going to happen, signposting for the audience.Another aspect of Lucia's libretto is that it gives words to characters who do not say much in St Mark's Gospel, and who we don't normally hear from, such as the haemorrhaging woman. She is healed by Christ when she touches the hem of his cloak, and she is given an aria. This focuses on the idea that the miracle is done on an outsider from society, that Christ rehabilitates her. There is an aria for the father of the possessed boy. Oliver sees the boy as suffering from a deeply embarrassing taboo issue, and both he and the haemorrhaging woman confide in Christ.

Oliver Tarney

For all the innovations in the work's libretto, Oliver sees it as a very traditional passion with arias, choruses and recitatives. It is quite dramatised in places, for instance Lucia has constructed a whole dialogue for Peter and the Maid at the moment of Peter's denial, and here Peter now has words from the Psalms a moment when he atones for his denial.

There is nothing of the literal crucifixion in Oliver's setting, he feels that it is too tricky a thing dramatically, and we know what happens. We do not need to see it, and instead his setting allows us to apprehend it in other ways. There is an orchestral outburst, and the Parable of the Stilling of the Storm. This parable not only links back to the scene in the Garden of Gethsemane but is foreshadowed in the Parable of the Vineyard: as in the parable, Christ is sleeping soundly as a storm rages. Oliver feels that this helps us to apprehend the crucifixion without depicting the worst part of the story.

For the final section of the work, Oliver weaves together lines taken from earlier in the Passion, from the parable settings and other places. He chose 14 themes, seeing them as seeds set up earlier in the work. Also, they are analogous to the 14 candles lit during the Tenebrae service, and Oliver has the various soloists falling out very much as the candles are extinguished during Tenebrae. This leads into a lullaby, and Oliver uses an old melody which is hinted at earlier in the work but only makes its full appearance here. It comes from the Maronite Syriac tradition and is sung on the Via Dolorosa annually in Jerusalem. The melody's origins are obscure and Oliver has failed to track them down, though it is an important melody connected to the crucifixion. He rather likes the idea that the melody belongs both to no time and all time, which feels most appropriate for the story. Yet the final words of the work are given to Jesus, saying 'He is not here'.

For the Durham performance the work will be semi-staged, an idea which delights Oliver. The performance is being directed by Donna Stirrup who directed the piece at the St Endellion Festival. At St Endellion they were not able to do as much staging as they wanted but what was done made the work more powerful Oliver feels. Aspects of the drama are operatic, the way characters interact. Also, the way different stories from the Parables are dropped into the narrative, Oliver thinks that an element of staging helps made the narrative clearer.

The gestation period for the St Mark Passion was three years including time working out what the story mean, what he was going to do with it and where the texts would come from.

Regarding writing another passion, he would never say never. Certainly in any future passion he would not do anything clever, and he is interested in simply focusing on the words from the Passion narrative. That said, he feels scared about both St John's and St Matthew's Gospels as both carry so much musical baggage. He admits that he might need a few years to pluck up the courage.

Whilst writing sacred choral music is something for which Oliver has become known, it is also important to him. He grew up religious and still is. He had a wonderful time in the church choir in Morecambe where he grew up; he found who he was musically with that repertoire and still lives it deeply. Purely instrumental music is something he has written, including writing a lot for his degree when he studied in Manchester. Furthermore, he quite enjoyed writing instrumental works but felt he had a lot more to say in choral music. That said, he would like to be attracted back to instrumental music but what he wants to say at the moment is best expressed chorally.

For Oliver, writing religious works would be difficult to do if there was nothing in terms of belief underlying things. What drew him to the story of the passion was that there is no explicit divine intervention, it is a very human story. What he is trying to do with his religious choral music, especially with the selection of texts, is to think how he can give a sense of something divine even if you don't believe. With his Magnificat, for instance, he feels you can get behind the story and understand what it meant to the people involved.

Looking ahead, he is starting work on another large-scale piece, a setting of the Stabat Mater. He is clearing the decks in preparation as he anticipates it will take him a year to write it. He is in the progress of writing a trilogy of canticles about women of the bible, with one already written. And though there is no commission (yet!) he has plans for a Christmas Oratorio, though he admits that he was never very good at writing jolly music, so the prospect is intriguing.

28 March 2026 - Oliver Tarney: St Mark Passion - Julian Close, Sam Utley, Paul Grant, Nicholas Morris, Beth Moxon, Darwin Prakash, Katy Thomson, The Durham Singers, Vox Populi, Durham Singers Camerata, Mark Jordan (piano), Tom Edney (conductor) - St Cuthbert's Chapel, Ushaw, Durham, DH7 7DW - Further details

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