‘Somewhere further North’: has an authentic voice from England’s ‘living centre of music’ survived in Andrew Downes?

Andrew Downes (1950-2023)

During 2026 Prima Facie is releasing three albums celebrating the choral works of the late Andrew Downes conducted by David Trippett. 

The first disc is released this month (March 2026) and features the premiere recording of Andrew Downes’ A St Luke Passion alongside his sacred choral music performed by the Philharmonia Orchestra and Philharmonia Voices conducted by David Trippett. In this guest article, David Trippett considers Andrew Downes's legacy.

Recent calls to ‘level up’ appear to have aged badly. The political slogan of the 2019 general election was short lived, but its consequences left the fate of English National Opera in the balance, even as it sought to champion left-behind bastions of culture outside London (via a £4.8B fund allocated to ‘maintaining, regenerating, or creatively repurposing existing cultural … assets’).  For decades, cultural historians have been suspicious of centre/periphery models – noting their hidden assumptions about hierarchy, homogeneity, and national prioritisation. In the event, the levelling-up fund was quietly retired (in 2022), exposed as so much hocus-pocus. Few would question the degree to which London’s musical institutions have drawn the lion’s share of investment in the arts, so the idea that musical activities outside the capital are somehow lesser lingers stubbornly. Exceptions abound (I hear you shout!), yet the very word provincial still carries a telltale hint of condescension.

In 1903, Elgar felt the need was the other way around. In a letter to The Musical Times he judged that the real engine of musical growth in England lay outside the capital. ‘Some day’ he mused, ‘the press will awaken to the fact, already known abroad and to some few of us in England, that the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further North.’

The press did cotton on. Later that year, Elgar conducted the premiere of his oratorio The Apostles for the Birmingham Music Festival at the city’s opulent Town Hall (built 1834), encased by its phalanx of Corinthian columns, a nod to Roman grandeur. Writing on The Apostles in 1925, the Hallé’s chorus master R. H. Wilson explained that the superior singers of northern choirs can’t simply be God-sent, they must be fostered by ‘environment and temperament’ because ‘for the last sixty or seventy years choral societies, large and small, have been abundant in the North, whilst it is only in quite recent years that London and its suburbs have taken choral singing seriously.’  Take that, London. Three years earlier, the 50-year-old Ralph Vaughan Williams scored a coup when his Mass in G Minor was premiered by the City of Birmingham Choir (6 December 1922). ‘Has it ever happened at a competitive festival’ Wilson asks, ‘that a representative choir from the North has been beaten by a Southern choir?’, adding for good measure: ‘And why is it that invariably the judges from London when adjudicating at Northern festivals find themselves short of superlatives to express their admiration?’  Gainful employment was different. Vaughan Williams—like Howells—had recently begun a teaching position at London’s Royal College of Music, but the crisp self-confidence Wilson would voice was thick in the air.

A century later, we might ask -- did this northern tradition of choral prowess and its vocal composition simply die out? Starved of funding, did it wither inevitably, subject to an ever-self-reinforcing gravitational pull from a capital bloated by institutional investment? And if not, to whom was the baton passed? A recently deceased student of Howells arguably provides a clue. A composer whose thirty-year tenure as head of Composition and Creative Studies at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire has left a cache of unrecorded choral and vocal works that are only now being performed and released. All this raises the question of whether a new recording I have been privileged to conduct may provide a link to this elusive tradition ‘further north’. 

No nostalgic spectacles are needed to make connections. Andrew Downes (1950-2023) was unquestionably a product of the Midlands heritage that once fired Elgar’s imagination. His father, Frank, played the horn with the CBSO and BBC Midland Light Orchestra; his uncle, Herbert (b. Walsall), was a founding member of the Philharmonia Orchestra, serving as principal viola for three decades. Born in Handsworth, Andrew Downes sang in the Midland Boy Singers and would spend his life championing the vibrancy of local music—while simultaneously projecting an international reputation through his own works, notably recording his symphonies and overtures with the Czech Philharmonic. A proud Black Country native, he carried the identity of his home region into his compositional materials – from local landscapes in the Clent and Malvern Hills that inspired a sense of the vastness of nature in his oratorio The Marshes of Glynn, to regional poets whose words he set, such as Frances Brett Young’s The Ballad of St Kenelm. In reflecting these roots, his music arguably lays claim to a distinctive ‘Midlands voice’ for choral music – yet stylistically updated, peppered with jazz, and inflected by borrowings from myriad global idioms.

‘I am quite besotted by the music of other cultures’ he once remarked at the Calcutta School of Music on a visit that catalysed his creation of a School of Composition and Creative Studies at Birmingham School of Music (now the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire). Comparing raga with Western chant and the spatial division of the octave, he reflects: ‘It’s very interesting to note that these ragas have much in common with the internal relationships of Western Modes … indeed the Raga Yaman, for example, is intervallically identical to the Greek Lydian mode’ – a mode strewn throughout his choral works. Similarly, an appetite for infusing jazz harmony with the Catholic mass set heads turning during our recording sessions for Downes’ Motet and Mass O Magnum Mysterium from 1969-73 (full blues scales in the Agnus Dei, mashing major and minor 3rds in the Benedictus, closing the Sanctus with a sustained half-diminished 7th). Nina Simone meets the Pope… 

We are long used to the freshness of global musics, of imbibing multi-cultural soundscapes. But that wasn’t always the case. Certainly not by the BBC of the 1960s and 70s. Downes was ahead of his time, then, and his mass will be released for the first time in 2026. Building his musical world in Birmingham, he proved a transformative figure: pioneering studies in ethnomusicology, encouraging the teaching of global musics and use of ethnic instruments among his students, fostering bridges between art and popular genres, and devising new courses, concerts, and festivals – all of which built a progressive composition department of international standing. Granville Bantock would have approved; when he accepted the post of principal at Birmingham’s School of Music in 1900 over a London professorship, he quipped that he would ‘rather reign in hell than serve in heaven.’

In a sense, Downes does follow in the footsteps of Midlands-born composers such as Elgar, Bantock, Julius Harrison, Francis Edward Bache, Christopher Edmunds, and John Joubert. But in another sense he was quite different: a skilled modalist, a renegade eclecticist, a telescoper of stylistic histories into new sonorities. 

In Downes, then, we have a unique voice that blends deeply choral musical instincts to a creative eclecticism that sparks and surprises in its imaginative reach. We also have a haunted link to Elgar’s ‘living centre of music’, in the sinuous lines of Downes’ English anthems and the schizophrenic alternation of austere/jazz idioms of his Latin Mass, and in the solo baritone’s operatic lyricism and choral drama of A St Luke Passion, with its pulverisingly triadic Credo that closes on an organum falling to bare octaves that could have been written by Hucbald a millennium ago. The new and the old glimmer in the sonic imagination – a living tradition evolved. 

Andrew Downes: A St Luke Passion & sacred choral works - Morgan Pearse, Philharmonia Voices, Philharmonia Orchestra, David Trippett - Prima Facie PFCD218

Never miss out on future posts by following us

The blog is free, but I'd be delighted if you were to show your appreciation by buying me a coffee.

Elsewhere on this blog

• Double, Double Toil & Trouble: the recorder quartet Palisander explore 900 years of music inspired by the mystical and magical - record review  
• Vital, alive & compelling: Handel's Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno from David Bates & La Nuova Musica at Wigmore Hall - concert review 
• From a Parisian salon to South America: Julieth Lozano Rolong in her Salon Concert for Opera Rara with Anna Tilbrook at Bechstein Hall - concert review 
• Catching lightning: Solomon's Knot explore George Jeffreys & the birth of the English Baroque at Wigmore Hall - concert review 
• Vinci's Artaserse in Chicago: Haymarket Opera Company's Craig Trompeter on countering the tendency for audiences to only listen to music that they know - interview 
• Sonic & dramatic splendour: Jonathan Cohen, Arcangelo & a strong cast demonstrate the richness to be found in Handel's Saul to open the London Handel Festival - concert review
• Epic Theatre? ENO's incoming music director, André de Ridder at the helm for Brecht & Weill's tricky Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny - opera review 
• A lightness of touch shot through with seriousness: a new Marriage of Figaro at Opera North with an engaging sense of ensemble - opera review
• Home