The return of plainchant

‘I’m still warmed up from last night,’ said Sophie Bevan early on a Sunday morning in the practice-room behind the presbytery of St Birinus Catholic Church in the charming village of Dorchester-on-Thames, Oxfordshire – a tiny Pugin-esque gem dwarfed by the enormous Anglican abbey up the road. She and the other four members of the Davey Consort (two of them her cousins from the musical Bevan clan) were running through a Renaissance polyphonic mass, with Sophie’s husband, the composer and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth, directing from the practice harpsichord.

Bevan had been the soprano soloist in Beethoven’s Ninth at the Festival Hall the previous evening, and tomorrow she and her husband would be flying to Helsinki for the week, where she would sing his orchestral song cycle and he would conduct Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. They’re one of the golden couples of the music scene. She’ll be singing the part of the Governess in Britten’s Turn of the Screw at Garsington this summer, and Wigglesworth is composing a piano concerto for Paul Lewis to play at this summer’s Proms, as well as launching the Knussen Chamber Orchestra (in memory of Oliver Knussen) at Aldeburgh as well as at the Proms.