Review Sir John Rutter’s Birthday Celebration – A dedicated national treasure celebrates his 80th birthday in style | classical music

He is a virtuoso of jubilant rhythm and the dean of lyrical melody. He has a way with suspensions—crunchy enough to penetrate subtlety like sunlight, but strictly PG-rated compared to the harmonic adventures of his contemporaries. His music is as unfashionably basic as a set of five M&S summaries, and as nondescriptly English as queuing.

From two royal weddings and coronations to choir rehearsals, school assemblies and carol services across the UK and North America, British composer John Rutter has dominated the English-speaking choral scene for six decades. At 80, he is in a class of his own: a dedicated national treasure, even referred to as “the composer who owns Christmas.”

St Paul’s Church was packed for this concert which included the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bach Choir conducted by Rutter himself. The cathedral’s magnificent dome makes a coughing sound that echoes like gunfire, but this multi-generational audience sat throughout the long program in complete silence. A dome could also wreak havoc on an unsuspecting performer, of course — but it wasn’t right for Rotter. He simply dealt with his weaknesses, introducing subtle pauses to allow the strings to flourish and leaving their exceptional resonance to take over at the end of each number.

Two major works for chorus and orchestra by Rotter fall into Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 5, in which the rough edges of VW’s pastoral modernism are smoothed to a high sheen, the RPO strings are expensively synthesized, and they reach an irresistibly majestic climax topped with lustrous brass. The world premiere of Rutter’s I’ll Make Me a World showcased the prodigious delivery of Bach’s choir and the RPO’s flair for musical code-switching, as baritone Jonathan Brown and mezzo Melanie Marshall led the way through gentle nods to African-American spirituals, blues and gospel.

Rutter’s 2015 cantata The Gift of Life, which outlines a range of religious texts including verses of his own, offered a very different compendium: tender melodies and elegant orchestrations, Broadway-ready orchestral overtures and sopranos illuminating the upper reaches of the tapestry. It was polished, predictable, and clearly enjoyed by the musicians on stage – the unmistakable work of a master craftsman.