Will Todd is one of those rare musicians who shows that there is life still in liturgical and sacred music. Sir James MacMillan is another, and one of the most memorable concerts of the last year was the premiere of their separate musical reflections on Cardinal Newman’s meditations at Farm Street Church, courtesy of the Genesis Foundation. “What was nice,” says Todd, “was how different the pieces were. It shows you the way the same text can give you different responses.”
Todd was already familiar with the meditations. “I was brought up Anglican,” he tells me, “but at our church in Durham one of our priests used to read Newman at evensong. It’s nice when you return to a text you associate with an earlier point in your life”. He’s familiar with the Catholic devotional world. “My mother was a Catholic,” he says. “Her family was Irish from a mining village. She went through a period of no faith in her twenties and when she returned to religion she ended up being invited to the university church by a friend.”
