|
|
The view down Hereford Cathedral at the opening service. Picture: Ash Mills Three Choirs Festival
Hereford Cathedral
TIME and again
the Three Choirs Festival, celebrating its 300th
birthday this year and held annually in one of the three cathedrals of
Worcester, Gloucester and Hereford, proves to be not just a major
artistic event, but one of the supreme highlights of the English musical
calendar. This month, after a
week at Hereford programmed by Artistic Director Geraint Bowen proved a
veritable triumph, all are in mourning, for one of the week’s finest
soloists, the organist John Scott. Scott went on from Hereford to give recitals in
mainland Europe, in Finland and Sweden, before returning to the United
States, where he was organist of St. Thomas’s, Fifth Avenue, New York.
He was immediately taken ill and died on Wednesday 12 August of a
suspected heart attack, aged only 59. A former organ scholar of St.
John’s College, Cambridge, John is a tragic loss to music on both sides
of the Atlantic.
John Scott gave one of
the world premieres of the week, of which there were in fact half a
dozen - an initiative of the Three Choirs that deserves recognition. On
this occasion it was a contribution to the growing
Orgelbüchlein
project, in which composers are building up a repertoire of modern organ
preludes inspired by Bach’s famous collection of that name. Anthony Powers is a significant figure in British
music, based in outer Herefordshire and thus a Midland composer in the
wider sense, who deserves a larger place on our concert platform. His
list of mentors is like a who’s who of great teachers of our era: Nadia
Boulanger, Elisabeth Lutyens, Bernard Rands, David Blake and Harrison
Birtwistle. Composer in Residence
and more recently Professor of Composition at Cardiff University, Powers
is a symphonist (his two symphonies followed one another in the 1990s),
a writer of concertos and (four) string quartets, and composer of choral
and vocal works. Appropriately, he has been commissioned before by the
Hereford Three Choirs: Airs and Angels
was a setting of seven poems by John Donne which centres around
(interestingly) Donne’s ‘A Nocturnal Upon St. Lucy’s Day’. Another 2015 Three
Choirs commission which gave immense satisfaction was ‘A
Swift Radiant Morning’. This was by
Welsh-born Rhian Samuel, co-editor of the New Grove (Norton) Dictionary
of Women Composers, and winner of the Glyndŵr Award for Outstanding
Contribution to the Arts in Wales. She has selected and set five poems
by the young poet Charles Sorley, who was killed in the vicious Battle
of Loos, fought between Lille and Arras in the autumn of 1915. Samuel, who turned 70
last year but is patently fresh and lithe as if she were just 30, is an
imaginative, fresh-thinking composer whose style here struck one as
always boldly original and exploratory. Sorley’s long free verse poem
The Sounds of War
builds via the ironic
‘Close by, a quick-firer is pounding away / Its allowance of a dozen
shells a day. / It is like a cow coughing’ to an explosive central and
final section (‘What you have seen is the foam and froth of war....Then
what pandemonium!’ It is not entirely a profound poem, but making
allowances for the age of the poet, its analogies are thought-provoking.
Elsewhere Sorley is in
rustic but prescient mood: ‘There, where the rusty iron lies / The rooks
are cawing all the day. / Perhaps no man, until he dies / Will
understand them, what they say’; and again with
The Signpost,
in which he addresses death, he recalls, tellingly, his personal school
runs from Marlborough over the Wiltshire Downs, in
In Memoriam S. C. W.
he remembers a Marlborough friend and Victoria Cross winner killed on 30
July, a few weeks before himself, at Hooge in Belgium; Woodruffe’s elder
brother, also a Marlburian, was killed two months earlier the same year.
Baritone Roderick Williams, who performed the cycle, a composer himself,
brought his profound musical insight and adorable tone to the settings
(much hinged, too, on the talents of his regular accompanist, Susie
Allan), and went on to fascinate by giving a rendering of Elgar’s
Sea Pictures,
written for and usually sung by a
female voice. (Australian Baritone Michael Lampard will sing the same
Elgar songs at the Perrin’s Hall, Royal Grammar School, Worcester on
Sunday 23 August at 3.00 p. m.). The week’s other
premieres included a new setting of the
Magnificat
and Nunc Dimittis
by the former King’s Singer Bob Chilcott, an
immensely popular composer whose Latin Requiem had already two days
earlier been brought to life by the Three Choirs Youth Choir, a
treasurable and gifted ensemble for 16 to 25 year olds founded in 2010
by Gloucester’s Adrian Partington and conducted here by Dr. Peter
Nardone, of Worcester Cathedral. This group, albeit a
little subdued in places,
shone
in many ways: the fine tenor soli of Ruairi Bowen, scion of a
multi-talented family, and the choir’s passionate
Exaudi cries
in the opening; a long drawn out treatment of the
Kyries; a
lilting Offertorio
and striking diminuendo in the dying away (‘from the pains of hell and
from the deep pit’). The soprano Sophie Gallagher was utterly beguiling
in the Pie Jesu,
with a distinctive clarinet winding up. The latter stages were if anything more engaging: vivid singing from the sopranos in the Benedictus; splendid use of woodwind in the Agnus Dei, again with appealing solo tenor passages; a glorious horn solo (plus oboe) in the setting of Purcell’s prayer ‘Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not Thy merciful ears unto our prayer’; and a charming use of wind quintet at the end. The poet Charles Hamilton Sorley, killed at Loos in October 1915 Young choirs sing
Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms
these days as if they had known them, and
their tricky Hebrew texts, all their lives. The big surprise was the
alto soloist, Patrick Dunachie, who sang ‘Adonai
ro-I’ as if he had been a King’s Singer
for years. And that he was, for he and Bowen are both ex-choral scholars
of King’s College, Cambridge. Utterly melting, exquisitely beautiful.
Other new works
included the imaginative setting of ‘Glory to Thee, my God, this night’
by the 300th
anniversary Choral Competition winner George Arthur; and by the
prominent German composer Torsten Rasch, who (like Rhian Samuel), in a
fabulously well conceived cycle sung with wisdom and insight by
mezzo-soprano Sarah Connolly, concentrated on one poet, the Welshman
Alun Lewis, killed in action in Burma in World War Two, aged 28. Chamber Music was very decently represented: the Bardic Trio, offering a selection of Celtic Song; the instrumental Ensemble 360, founded in Sheffield by the late violinist Peter Cropper, in gorgeously alluring mixed repertoire - Britten, Debussy and composers from Eastern Europe (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland); the Wihan Quartet (Smetana, etc.) and the Ferio Saxophone Quartet; - bringing Michael Nyman, the Hungarian Ferenc Farkas (1905-2000), Graham Fitkin and less well known figures from France (Jean Rivier, 1896-1987, a colleague of Milhaud) and Belgium (Jean-Baptiste Singelée, 1812-75, who was a friend and contemporary of the saxophone’s inventor, Adolphe Sax, 1814-94). Add to these
scintillating solo recitals by legendary pianist Steven Osborne and by
several young organists (the whole of Widor’s Symphony No. 5; Langlais
and Leighton, plus Arvo Pärt’s mesmerising
Pari Intervallo;
Jehan Alain and Henri Mulet), plus near the close, the wondrously
talented Natalie Clein (BBC Young Musician of the Year award-winning
cellist) with her Norwegian accompanist, playing in their disarming way
Debussy, Kurtág and Rachmaninov.
Worth mentioning is a specially enterprising
vocal concert by what are described as the Three Choirs Festival Young
Musicians of 2014, in a programme of Schubert, Brahms, Richard Strauss
with a second half of English Song, including Butterworth - another who
died in a World War campaign - Frank Bridge, his pupil Britten; and an
intriguing addition, ‘So we’ll go no more a-roving’ (words Lord Byron)
by Maude Valérie White (1855-1937), a hugely successful Victorian
song-writer, and the first female winner of the coveted Mendelsson Prize
who lived into her 80s but is miserably neglected by recent generations. She dedicated this, perhaps her most popular song, to her contemporary, the actor Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1852-1917). The Festival Players, a
vivacious and enlivening ensemble directed by Michael Dyer, each of
whose half-dozen performers played many parts, brought Shakespearian
drama with Henry IV
(a one afternoon conflation of Parts 1 and 2); and
As You Like It.
One of the other main ‘dramatic’ happening was a (partially comic)
recital by Sir Roy Strong and actress Siân
Phillips
of readings from across the centuries, from Edward III and his
unfortunate grandson Richard II via Henry VIII and Elizabeth I to
Victoria and Edward VII. Different speakers also offered a view on the
great anniversaries of 2015: the Magna Carta (1215), the Jacobite Rising
of James III (the ‘Old’ Pretender - 1715) and the Battle of Waterloo
(1815).
But appetising though all this was, it in a sense
constitutes a Three Choirs ‘fringe’ - a very important one - to the
main, mostly evening, concerts in the Cathedral. These are the major
occasions on which throughout the entire week the Three Choirs Festival
Chorus - a vast and superb array of singers drawn from the choral
societies of the three constituent cathedrals - is supported by the
presence of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Each of these are, in their way, magnificent
musicians. While the choir is the focus of the whole event, the
orchestra provides the backbone - excelling in works like the Verdi
Requiem (who could imagine such a work without the full force of the
Philharmonia’s orchestral brass?) The fact that the
festival could add on almost as an
envoi this giant of the choral
repertoire, conducted with shrewdness, dependability and perceptiveness
by Geraint Bowen, speaks reams for the stature of the Three Choirs.
Originally conceived of
for Rossini’s funeral, and latterly perhaps a memorial to his own
mother, it is well worthy of the creator of the
Tournedos Rossini,
or as a family memorial - or indeed, from that same period, of Berlioz:
‘An opera in disguise’, some dubbed it: not so much dark and mystical,
the programme notes suggested, as overtly dramatic. The cellos at the
opening, the tenors (real
tenors, they sounded like) for the initial ‘Te
decet hymnus’, the Philharmonia
trumpets for ‘Tuba mirum’
- all these got us off to a spellbinding start. Later it was solo
detail - the soprano’s octave fall (prizewinner Katherine Broderick;
Bowen certainly showed a fine-honed talent for recruiting his soloists
this summer), the cello link to the mezzo (Catherine Wyn-Rogers) before
a stunning upper voice duet in the ‘Recordare’
section, which greatly impressed. Bass Alastair Miles
brought his classic Verdian operatic
voice to ‘Confutatis maledictis’,
relishing those sinister ‘flammis
acribus addictis’.
The choir men rounding off the ‘Lacrymosa’,
excelled. ‘Hostias’
was the best contribution from Justin Lavender, here in earlier passages
a slightly uneven tenor replacement. The impact of the
soprano-led Libera me
was quite staggering.
Nor should one omit the very last, or ensuing ‘extra’ night, in which
community groups ventured forth in the cathedral to sing a varied,
attractively international programme, led by the South African-born
baritone Njabulo Madlala, an immensely popular figure with a pretty
sensational voice and delicious presence, not least in the culminating
Medley of African songs.
And this was the
uplifting story for most of the week-long festival. Perhaps most welcome
from the point of view of repertoire were two evenings early on: first,
the dazzling Turangalila
Symphony of Olivier Messiaen, steered through by the superlative Dutch
conductor Jac van Steen, in which the various cyclic elements that run
through the work, and the startling orchestration require profoundly
careful and attentive balancing. Despite its
revolutionary nature it’s a work I find, as Messiaen evolves the
sequential and sectional techniques which were to last him a lifetime,
has its longueurs.
Yet from the wonderful tuned and untuned percussion to the riches of
wind and brass, it is certainly a vast monolith, or should I say
polylith? Tellingly, it played to a full cathedral; so much for the idea
that Three Choirs audiences will boycott something new. The other was Sir
Arthur Bliss’s Morning Heroes.
Conducted by Sir Andrew Davis and led by a replacement Speaker, Malcolm
Sinclair, who performed remarkably well (apart, perhaps, from some
scattered weak consonants), the work, first heard in 1930, is a heaving
lament for the brutality and thoughtlessness of war, expressed through
the powerful poetry of Homer’s Iliad,
Walt Whitman (Drum-Taps)
and then Wilfred Owen (‘Spring
Offensive) and Robert Nichols,
1893-1944, who fought at both Loos and in France (‘Dawn
on the Somme’), the whole work is an
outpouring of grief and anger. Bliss himself served
almost throughout the Great War. The work is strikingly well conceived -
the offsetting of female voices (‘Vigil’) and men’s voices (opening ‘The
Bivouac’s Flame’; richly coloured orchestral playing in the latter;
details of chromatic flute or tramping double basses in the first
Whitman extract; immensely expressive solo tympanum during the Owen.
This was a performance to remember, and no less because of a strongly
articulated and latterly heaving Fifth Symphony of Sibelius in the first
half (both this and the Nielsen above being 150th
anniversary tributes to their respective composers). The week’s close-packed
events also included a Dream of
Gerontius performed with much flair,
not least from the vigorous triple chorus, a
Mass
in C (Beethoven) that had massive
weight and majesty, and a double bill of Carl Nielsen and Mathias that
unveiled the extraordinary expressiveness and orchestrating gifts of the
latter. These last were conducted, respectively, by Geraint Bowen’s
colleagues, Adrian Partington of Gloucester and Peter Nardone of
Worcester.
Yet two of the
Festival’s most beautifully executed programme events were outside the
Philharmonia’s orbit. One, by the National Youth Orchestra of Wales, had
the wit to preface Stravinsky’s ever-familiar
The Rite of Spring
with two real rarities: the 1912 one-act
ballet La Péri,
heralded by a famously éclatant
brass Fanfare, by Debussy’s colleague Paul Dukas; and another symphonic
poem, La Tragédie de Salomé,
by Florent Schmitt. Both works, it should be noted, predate the
Rite by some time, and the influence of
Schmitt’s seminal work on Stravinsky is broadly accepted. In the Dukas, the
contrasting pianissimo strings, the La
Mer-like surges, the vital woodwind
detail all made a great impact, to my ears brilliantly played by these
young performers under the encouraging lead of former ENO musical Paul
Daniel, who conducted. The Schmitt impacted in other ways: the general
swirl, bass clarinet muttering under its colleagues, a sectional launch
that seems to anticipate Holst, or a spare passage allocated to two
clarinets and two trumpets: there is far too much to itemise. The other winning event, were this a keenly
contested competition, was undoubtedly the ‘out of season’ performance
of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, given on the Tuesday by the Three
Cathedral Choirs (boys and men, as opposed to the mixed voice Festival
Chorus). Three things guaranteed this to be a concert that
was out of this world: the one concert of the week that achieved an
elevated status as no other did, despite their individual excellence,
apart from the youth orchestra’s appearance. What sealed it was the
Evangelist; the performance of Christ himself; and the acute
intelligence not just of the boys, but of the whole choir. The Narrator, tenor James Oxley, sang the entire
work from memory; in German, no little feat: and his daring enabled him
to devote all his energy to meditate upon the words, and deliver a
concentrated, thrilling reading that led us to focus on Christ’s arrest,
trial and crucifixion. Admirable though the
other soloists proved, especially the expressive countertenor William
Towers, and a rather good St. Peter from the choir ranks not least, it
was the superb enunciation of the German texts by these articulate and
obviously magnificently trained boys, who brought their own character to
chorales (‘Befiehl du deine Wege’
and choruses alike
(‘Sind Blitze, sind Donner’,
‘Der du den Tempel Gottes zerbrichst’),
with the three lower voices in able support, which impressed everyone.
The ensemble, the
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, brought capable oboe
obbligati
and especially two magical violin solos to the unfolding of the famous ‘Erbarme
dich’ and ‘Gebt
mir meinen Jesum wieder’, plus the
second appearance of the six-stringed viola da gamba (Roderick
Williams’s ‘Komm, süsses Kreuz’)
evoking Simon of Cyrene’s readiness to release Jesus from carrying the
cross.
And there was Matthew
Brook’s singing of the crucial role of Christ. Many are those who have
essayed this role and not quite triumphed; perhaps many who have. Brook
is among the noblest of them all. Jesus has less to sing in the later
stages than in Bach’s earlier St. John
Passion. But in the initial scenes one
heard Brook’s glorious voice and magnetising interpretation to best
effect: the house at Bethany, and the full pathos of The Last Supper;
Jesus’s warning to St. Peter and the betrayal and arrest in the Garden
of Gethsemane; and latterly his prediction to the High Priest and famous
‘du sagest’s’
in reply to Pilate, were brought out to staggeringly intense and
powerful effect. Matthew Brook’s voice and stage persona are
things one would gladly travel a long way to hear. He is the tops. And
here, with the attentive continuo of the OAE, we surely caught him at
his very best. So this was a festival to be treasured and
marvelled at from start to finish: something to set against much
celebrated Edinburgh Festival and BBC Proms. Now the bandwagon moves on
to Gloucester for 2016, and we are all in eager anticipation. Roderic Dunnett
08-15
|
|
|