The relatively obscure St Mark Passion by Sir Charles Wood deserves more recognition.

This setting of the St Mark Passion is by one of England’s finest choral composers, Charles Wood. It was commissioned by none other than the Rev’d Dr Eric Milner-White, who gave us the well known Ceremony of Nine Lessons and Carols, now heard around the world at Twelvetide in performances good, indifferent and atrocious, more often than not the last.

Wood’s St Mark Passion has enjoyed nowhere near the success of Lessons and Carols, though it is performed occasionally in England at Passiontide. That’s a pity because it is a lovely, well-crafted work. Particularly effective is the composer’s setting and use of the plainchant Pange lingua gloriosi. Also noteworthy, his setting of the hymn by Francis Xavier, My God I Love Thee (No. 7), which never fails to move this writer to the quick.

The recording shown above is the only one of the work known to your Tatler and is, happily, a fine one. The choir and soloists are all superb, as are both the organist, Daniel Hyde, and the organ itself. Recorded in the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge with its excellent acoustic for music, along with first rate engineering by Naxos, the audio is of demonstration quality. If you have a decent sound system this recording will give extra pleasure. You can listen to it here.

Faux-conservatives running for office in New York.

In her column for Human Events, The Sidewalks of New York, Jacqueline Toboroff, a divorced mother of two gamely trying to raise her children in New York City, writes of a new effort by some of the City’s Democrats to separate themselves from the destructive policies of their far-left colleagues. They style themselves “Common Sense Democrats,” perhaps referencing the late Edward Koch, New York’s Democrat mayor over forty years ago who called himself “a liberal with sanity” (which he was).

So there’s a new grift in town; the “Common Sense” Democrats.  

This is a calculated move by a current crop of candidates running for public office, to get elected under the premise of making it onto the ballot as a Democrat, espousing some “common sense”; i.e. Republican beliefs, but ultimately bringing us the same failed policies.  Common Sense Democrats are like a triple agent; Democrats acting as Republicans but tied to Democrat core beliefs.  

[snip]

Change is afoot.  74% of New York City voters say crime is a very serious issue, according to the Quinnipiac Poll – the highest recorded since the poll first asked the question back in 1999. 68% of registered voters in New York City are Democrat.  And just to look at the disenfranchisement; even a so-called “moderate” Democrat, Mayor Adams, barely won his primary and only won with 17.5% of registered voters.  Translation, even in a Democrat city, Democrats are turned off. 

Toboroff’s numbers are good, but she may not remember New York’s Democrats were “turned off” once before in the early ’90s during hapless Mayor David Dinkins’s single term, which was marred by circumstances nearly identical to those today: runaway crime, dangerous subways, garbage and filth everywhere and, of course, ubiquitous homeless encampments. Dinkins was spectacularly ineffectual and after three nights of riots in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn and him doing nothing, the New York Post ran a headline that stuck to him for the rest of his term: Dave, Do Something!

A few years later Dinkins was booted by the voters, but something far more remarkable also occurred; a Republican was elected Mayor of New York, in the person of Rudolf Giuliani. While Ms Toboroff is correct saying Democrats comprise a whopping 68% of the electorate in New York these days, that percentage was nearly identical in 1993 when Republican Giuliani won. Which raises the question: how could it have happened?

It happened because a great many Democrats, many of them life-long, went to the polling stations in 1993, held their noses and voted Republican. Their reason for crossing party lines was obvious; the City was in a mess and the incumbent showed no desire or ability to “do something,” whereas his opponent, an aggressive former district attorney (too aggressive, some said), ran a vigorous campaign stressing his no-nonsense attitude toward crime and criminals. That appealed to many Democrats at the time and they voted for him. Those Democrats, unlike their present day impostors, were the true “Common Sense” Democrats. Alas, more than two decades later the true common-sense Democrats are long gone. They’ve either died or moved out of the City.

The result of their departure was revealed when an intellectually-challenged and undistinguished pol (at least Dinkins had a solid political background), Bill de Blassio (née Warren Wilhelm), whose only accomplishment was taking on the horse-drawn cabs of Central Park, earning him the wrath of the Teamsters Union, ran for mayor and won handily. Those who bothered to vote, only 13.4%, embraced his extreme ultra-left wing platform and sadly, there were no more “common sense” Democrats remaining in New York to vote against him. De Blasio, though even more incompetent than Dinkins, got off to a fine start undoing the accomplishments of his predecessors (seem familiar?) and had made good progress by the end of his first term. When he ran for re-election, he won by an even larger margin, with a slightly larger turnout (it was after that election your Tatler, seeing a grim future for the city he loved (though never dreaming it would get as bad as it did), decided it was time to go.

In the mayoral elections of New York in 2013 and 2017, the vast majority of voters, meaning the vast majority of Democrats, stayed home rather than vote for the Republican candidates who, if lacking the forceful personality of Rudy Giuliani, were solid candidates and infinitely superior to de Blasio. Though we may assume even today most Democrats in New York share Republicans being “turned off” by the state of things, that is as far as they will go. They don’t dare risk staining their character by demanding more cops with fewer onerous restrictions, schools that teach reading and writing instead of CRT, encouraging third graders to consider sex changes etc.

So, Common Sense Democrats, give it a rest. You don’t fool anyone though you do look foolish. Unless you are brave enough to do more than wring your hands at the results of policies destroying our cities and nation, and actually condemn them and their treasonous sponsors, your activities are utterly worthless. You would do a lot more good, come the next election, by covering your faces, slinking into the polling station and voting Republican. It worked wonders before.

From John Downland’s Third Book of Songs, this one is a delight, with the clever wordplay of the poem and of course its masterly setting.

It was a Time when Silly Bees Could Speak

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex

It was a time when silly bees could speak,

And in that time I was a silly bee,

Who fed on time until my heart ’gan break,

Yet never found the time would favour me.

Of all the swarm I only did not thrive,

Yet brought I wax and honey to the hive.

Then thus I buzzed when time no sap would give:

Why should this blessed time to me be dry,

Sith by this time the lazy drone doth live,

The wasp, the worm, the gnat, the butterfly?

Mated with grief I kneeled on my knees,

And thus complained unto the king of bees:

My liege, gods grant thy time may never end,

And yet vouchsafe to hear my plaint of time,

Which fruitless flies have found to be a friend,

And I cast down when atomies do climb.

The king replied but thus: Peace, peevish bee,

Thou’rt bound to serve the time, the time not thee.