Tag Archives: Benjamin Britten

Lammermuir: Roderick Williams / Scottish Opera

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Holy Trinity Church / St Mary’s Kirk, Haddington

A year ago, baritone Roderick Williams sang Britten’s War Requiem in Hiroshima, one of a global run of performances of the work that included Tel Aviv and Kyiv, marking both 80 years of the end of World War 2 and the 50th anniversary of the composer’s death, which falls on December 6 this year.

It was the latter that received due recognition on Friday at the Lammermuir Festival, with Williams on his best form in a late night recital with pianist Christopher Glynn in Haddington’s Scottish Episcopal Church.

Ironic self-deprecation is the lingua franca of musicians, but few deploy it with the charm of this singer and his was the most personal of programmes, finding room for two settings of Blake that he wrote as a teenager to follow Britten’s Songs and Proverbs of William Blake, composed for Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the mid-1960s.

Williams, who made his own excellent recording of the cycle, knows the work inside out, and delivers the crucial proverbs with as much panache as the more familiar songs, like The Tyger and the psychological A Poison Tree. His own early works may be musically naïve in comparison but they are very lovely.

As are the four songs by Britten’s mentor Frank Bridge that followed, all from the early years of the 20th century, and appealing art songs that are often very nearly show tunes.

Britten found his own way with traditional and familiar material in the quartet Williams ended with, including The Salley Gardens and a knowingly-delivered The Foggy, Foggy Dew. Williams’ own Bach-inspired arrangement of A Red, Red Rose made a perfect encore.

The recital was presented by Lammermuir as a coda to Scottish Opera’s contribution to this year’s programme, a showcase for three Emerging Artists singing Britten with the orchestra.

These recruits to the company will all shortly be seen in the company’s touring production of Hansel and Gretel, and if their individual dramatic expressiveness in this programme is any guide, that should be well worth catching.

Conductor Douglas Boyd is possibly still remembered in his native Scotland as an oboe player, but he has been exclusively a conductor for 20 years and artistic director at Garsington Opera for much of that time, bringing a memorable Rusalka to the Edinburgh International Festival four years ago.

Directing the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, he began, appropriately, with Arvo Part’s Cantus in memoriam Benjamin Britten, a brief work that has exceeded its original inspiration (Part admired but never met the British composer) to become a concert hall favourite. It worked brilliantly here not just for its dedication but also its suitability to the acoustic of St Mary’s – Boyd allowing the orchestra’s carefully calibrated strings to build incrementally – and the obvious parallel Part intended with the tolling bell opening of Britten’s final composition, the Phaedra cantata he wrote for Janet Baker.

Almost a mini-opera in itself, mezzo Charlotte Clapperton projected the confessional mix of recitative and song in a committed characterisation. Britten clearly appreciated the story-telling of Robert Lowell’s English version of Racine, and that narrative directness balances the emotional torment conveyed by the music, scored by strings with percussion and harpsichord.

From forty years earlier in the composer’s career, the song cycle Our Hunting Fathers  employed the fullest edition of the Orchestra of Scottish Opera, the winds (including alto saxophone) and brass essential to its effectiveness. The challenge it presented to soprano Avery Lafrentz was immense and she dealt with its tricky libretto, assembled and partly written by W H Auden, with aplomb.

There is much in this complex early work – which baffled some in 1936 – that prefigures the War Requiem, but it is structurally much less easy to decode. The scoring for the orchestra, which uses some of the sonic palette of contemporary dance bands, and the demands on the singer, grappling with overlapping texts and exclamations, are virtuosic however, and it made a terrific climax to the concert.

It was the other soprano, Charlotte Jane Kennedy, who had the programme’s most appealing and often-sung work. Les Illuminations, setting a selection of texts by Arthur Rimbaud to string orchestra accompaniment, has the undoubted advantage of being in mellifluous French and is Britten on the road to being a great opera composer.

As often heard sung by a tenor, following Peter Pears’ adoption of the work, the brightness of a soprano – and Kennedy has that quality along with power at both ends of her range – is arguably best suited to the piece, regardless of the homo-erotic message in Being beauteous.

It was noticeable, too, that Kennedy referred less to the music-stand in her performance, but then she had the work that could prove the most useful repertoire addition to a blossoming career.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Sally Anderson

RSNO / Sondergard

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Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

There was something very radical about Thomas Sondergard’s first War Requiem with the RSNO.

The ingredients and shape of Benjamin Britten’s perennial concert of remembrance, themselves a mirror of those that made the Edinburgh International Festival 15 years earlier, are so familiar – to many contemporary schoolchildren as well as those of 1962 – that the work seems to require concentration on the structure the composer created.

The RSNO’s music director, however, looked beyond that from the first bars of his War Requiem on Saturday evening.

Of course, all the building blocks were there: the orchestra’s chorus, now directed by Stephen Doughty, in the choir stalls, and the RSNO Junior Chorus, drilled by Patrick Barrett, invisible to most but very audible in the balcony; a packed platform with John Poulter’s percussion at the front of a chamber orchestra led by Maya Iwabuchi stage left, and Lena Zeliszewska the first violin of the bulk of the ensemble on Sondergard’s other side.

The conductor was also flanked by tenor Magnus Walker and baritone Benjamin Appl, while soprano Susanne Bernhard, as is now customary, was amongst the musicians and nearer her choral partners in the score.

That chorus, though, began its Requiem Aeternam almost at a whisper, and without standing. And when Walker, an on-the-day dep for the indisposed Stuart Jackson, intoned Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth, it was entirely without tolling bells or rattling guns, but as a quiet cry of despair. The “pity of war” was no memory here – it was a lamentable presence in the hall.

If this was startling and disconcerting – this is not how Britten’s War Requiem is supposed to begin, surely? – it was also incontrovertibly true. We live at a time where war in Europe is no history lesson, but on our televisions daily, in a way that it was not when the composer’s work premiered.

Sondergard’s War Requiem played out in real time as an operatic soundtrack. It was as slow as I have ever heard it, and more integrated as a piece of through-composed music. Anyone without a libretto on their knee would have been pushed to identify all the switches from Latin liturgy to 20th century verse, and the contrasts between those elements, as sung by the choirs and soprano on the one hand and the male soloists on the other, and played by each of the teams of instrumentalists, were never a distracting part of the mechanism of the performance, where that is often the crucial engine of an interpretation.

Instead, from that disconcerting opening, where listeners familiar with the work might have struggled to find their path, the 90-minute score blossomed as a debate and dialogue between all those instrumental and vocal ingredients. If you share the faith expressed in the words of the “In paridisum” towards its end, there is comfort there, but the message that little has changed in our own age was stronger, and the final prayer for eternal rest for those who have fallen and will fall held Saturday’s audience in solemn silence at the work’s end.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Susanne Bernhard by Christine Schnieder