AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE:
This is a remarkable document of a remarkable large-scale piece that, in all likelihood, won't be performed again. This Church (completed in 2003) celebrates the 900th anniversary of Saint Mary de Haura, a church on England's Sussex coast. Finnissy's music is a gorgeous, living reliquary for the constellation of texts forming the libretto, a documentary collage that tells the story of "this church" in all senses of the word - as a building, as a centre of worship, as a political entity and most important, as the embodiment of a community.

That community forms part of the fabric of this performance - the church's choir and handbell chorus are at the piece's musical and dramatic core. Finnissy has planted ringers in the choir, but doesn't try to burnish the amateur roughness out of he ensemble. Good! Their function is to be the voice of the community- they sing hymns, as one might expect, but they also function as a Geek chorus, declaiming and chanting quotidian texts made uncanny - texts that set forth the rules for the church school on its founding long ago, that charge a secretive and parsimonious minister with crimes and misdemeanors in 1721, that describe the operation of a World War I-ear gas mask equipped with a brightly colored cloth "to show our own aircraft that one is British... [and] prevent them from dive-bombing or machine-gunning you."

The choir constitutes one of several strands of material that Finnissy juxtaposesin this hour-long, four-part work. Another is characterized by narration thatis not done in the slick style of a James Earl Jones, but rather sounds likeparishioners have been called up to do the weekly reading; this is usually accompanied by chamber writing full of overt gimcrackery meant to sound like the common folks' notion of avant-garde music, an Ivesian conceit. Finnissy's style owes much to Ives, but has a distinctly British theatrical flavor that calls to mind a folksy retooling of Birtwistle of Davies, if you can imagine such a thing.

Like Golijov's St Mark Passion , this piece owes everything to the performers it was written for. The professionals sound like professionals, the amateurs sound like amateurs, and they are wonderful together. But it enjoys the additional virtues of a taut structure and some real passion and humanity. We're lucky indeed they made this recording.
“Quinn”

THE WIRE: (TOP CDs OF 2003)
A year when CDs dropped through the letterbox in ever increasing numbers, therefore the courage of Finnissy's This Church in challenging preconceived notions of new music stood out like a beacon...
Philip Clark

MUSICAL POINTERS:
Written and composed from 2001 until completion in 2003, Sussex composer Michael Finnissy (b. 1946) celebrated the 900th anniversary of Saint Mary de Haura with a locally motivated creation, its outcome of a universality which deserves performances in churches nation-wide. This Church brought to mind St Nicholas (composed for Lancing College, close by Shoreham) and other community-inspired works of Britten.

Finnissy thinks of St Mary de Haura as typical of countless churches across the whole of England and its story which he tells as exemplifying the history of Christianity in this country from Norman times to the present. He meets this lofty aim with a compilation of textsof endless interest and fascination, the words (all provided, together with their sources) likely to claim centre stage on first hearing, but underpinned with evocative music which makes the whole greater than the sum of its disparate parts.

Drawing upon Michael Finnissy's breadth of culture and wide reading, it is an ambitious, but at the same time economical and unpretentious, oratorio for our times, the particular evoking generalisations of place and time, the music supporting the moods in a mainly unassertive way. There are two spoken narrators, a chorus based upon the church's own choir. A solo mezzo sings a text by Hildegard von Bingen, and Richard Jackson, baritone, takes the lion's share with substantial passages of text ranging from the 3rd century A.D., via 18th C writings including Defoe, forward to moving 20th C. extracts of 1914 and 1945 from the St Mary's parish magazine. That last of the four sections is utterly compelling on CD, but This Church is essentially a work to experience live.
Peter Grahame Woolf

THE SUNDAY TIMES:
Finnissy is always his own man, but This Church (2003) is idiosyncratic even by his standards. A 66-minute work for baritone, mezzo-soprano, two narrators, organ, choir and ensemble, it traces in close documentary detail the 900-year history of a Christian church: St Mary de Haura in New Shoreham, West Sussex. The text, derived not only from local records but from the writings of Defoe, Kierkegaard and others, is variously read, intoned and sung, and the work's four parts are articulated by means of four overlapping musical cycles. The textures are always spare and the manner ritualistic, but the journey from "Kyng Edward the syxt" to the first world war is epic.
Paul Driver

SHROPSHIRE STAR:
Too little attention is cast upon contemporary music. But while people thrill to the sound of historic favourites, there are new compositions worthy of note. One such is Finnissy's This Church, a cycle of stirring, beautifully-sung music performed with great skill.
Andy Richardson

THE WIRE:
When news of Michael Finnissy's conversion to Christianity reached the nerve centres of the international avant garde, many were despondent. History is littered with casualties of organised religion's ability to recruit rebellion to its hierarchical structures, from St Francis to Roy Bhaskar, TS Eliot to Cat Stevens .Finnissy was the composer whose anger at social justice put the 'cunt' into English Country Tunes, the firebrand who surrounded a grand piano with teddy bears and had the hapless pianist read out newspaper headlines for a prestigious BBC Radio3 broadcast. The question was: would Finnissy's music subdue itself to the conservatism of an ideological structure whose material base is in feudal land ownership and ground rent?

This Church was recorded at St Mary de Haura Church in Shoreham on 14 and 15February 2003. The musical forces are designed to suit the tradition echoic, with choirs, pip organ, spoken word and solo singers Richard Jackson and Jane Money. Finnissy played piano with the The Ixion Ensemble which includes the brilliantflautist Rowland Sutherland, accordionist Yao Yi, three strings and the lively percussion of Joby Burgess. Conducting from the piano, he also wrote parts for The Saint Mary Handbell Ringers. Hence non-believers are not only threatened with the grisly boredom of a church service, but also with the ersatz nationa lfolk imbecilism of jangling Morris dancers.

The good news is that Finnissy has not recanted on the founding heresy of modern music: atonality. The opening has the slightly hysterical, unnerving instability of his classic manner, with a male falsetto harried by irrational metrics. If in writing for non=specialists, he is forced to use sea shanty rhythms and liturgical phrases, he has not borrowed an techniques from pious minimalism or Techno Trance .in giving narration to church members - Finnissy is an active member of his chosen congregation, engaging in church politics and theological controversies with glee - he shows the confidence in homely, unspun humanity characteristic of anyecht punk, revolutionary socialist or social worker. He has researched the history of Shoreham from the parish archives, giving us details that are nuanced and troubled, such as the missionary who begins to doubt his faith. The way he integrates the spoken word - the double bass jazzily taking up the narrative, the integration of psychedelic, key crazy instrumentation with level speech - is bravura, extending the legacy of Benjamin Britten in an utterly unexpected way. Atonality is used to expose voices and facts in their raw immediacy. You may cringe at what you hear, but if so, you're disliking people, which makes you feel ashamed. Perhaps the atheist cannot quite credit the gorgeous communitarian crescendo of the finale ,but we're touched nonetheless.

Finnissy's avant garde integrity gave the lie to the musical compromises of the post modernist 1980s. Now This Church shows how, in attempting to borrow the heady perfumes of liturgy without embracing a particular congregation Jan Garbarek and John Tavener and Gavin Bryars gave us a phoney high. This music has grit and invention and documents a genuine situation: a cutting reproach to the glibness and ingratiation which seem to be the inevitable condiment to commerce.
Ben Watson