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King's College Chapel, Cambridge
30 March 2004
Britten Sinfonia
Polyphony
Stephen Layton, conductor
LIGHT and darkness met head on
under the fan vaulting, when the Britten Sinfonia and Stephen Layton’s
fine choir, Polyphony, gave the first of their two Easter concerts, one
in Cambridge and one in Norwich. This was Lenten entertainment with a
difference, and a capacity audience, rapt and finally rapturous, seemed
to know it.
The cry of “My God, my God,
why have you forsaken me?” was where this concert began and ended, and
its echoes literally reverberated through the evening. At first, the cry
was wordless. Shostakovich dedicated his Eighth String Quartet to the
memory of the victims of war and fascism, and the Britten Sinfonia played
Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of the quartet as Chamber Symphony with a
clarity and focus which both defied and connived with the acoustic of
King’s College Chapel. It’s an acoustic Layton knows inside out, of course;
and his control of pacing and textures left the music with teeth, and
even gave it a heightened sense of struggle.
This Shostakovich, a lament for
a war-torn Europe , became a pre-echo of the evening’s major work, James
MacMillan’s remarkable cantata for choir and string orchestra, Seven
Last Words from the Cross.
Ten years on from his composition,
the work is still shocking and consoling, lamenting and uplifting all
at once. The fusion of King’s reverberating, radiating acoustic and the
most meticulous detail drawn by Layton reinforced its wonders: the thrill
of opposing sound and silence, melody and chant in the opening Hosanna
of forgiveness; the brilliance of each voice flaming together at the top
of their registers in Woman, Behold thy Son!; the dark grain
of bass lines in Behold the Wood of the Cross; and the long dying
falls as life and music expire.
Between these two works of the
shadowlands, glowed Morten Lauridsen’s cycle Lux aeterna, a classic
of new American choral writing. This light-filled continuum of sacred
texts is as simple as MacMillan’s work is sophisticated: Lauridsen intended
it to be as accessible to amateurs as to professionals. Renaissance polyphony
and Brucknerian close-harmony, Old World structures and New World spirit
interwine in a cunningly written score, at once sensuous and spare.
Once again, the music was perfectly
tuned to its environment, and Layton exploited both to full advantage.
The counterpointing of voices and orchestra was miraculously transparent,
as Requiem led to invocation and celebration and back again, and the single
word “aeterna” was repeated, echo upon echo, bringing the music full circle.
The Times
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