However, this lunchtime Prom recital at Cadogan Hall by the BBC Singers
showed that he is just as at home before a 24-voice a cappella choir, his
open hands as light and elegant as a bird’s wing, his gestures free,
natural and masterly in crafting impassioned swells, finely graded fades
and wonderfully responsive presentation of the poetic texts presented in
this sequence of English part-songs, predominantly dating from early
twentieth century but also including a new work by Laura Mvula commissioned
by the BBC.
Oramo has been Chief Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra since 2013 –
fittingly his first performance as Chief Conductor came during that year’s
Prom season – and during his tenure he has presided over many performances
involving the BBC Singers, but this was the first time that he had
conducted the ensemble a cappella. The repertoire seemed to represent both
Oramo’s own love of British music, which developed during the ten years,
1998-2008, he spent as Music Director of the City of Birmingham Symphony
Orchestra, and the singers’ own musical heritage. One imagines that many
must have encountered these works during their early training in the
country’s cathedral establishments. Certainly, they were perfectly attuned
to the idiom and the result was an exquisite, blemish-free, consistent
like-mindedness which was both a glory and, perhaps, a slight weakness.
For, the programme, entitled The Sense of an Ending, presented a
largely homogenous autumnal sobriety and it was delivered with polite
gentility and restraint, the sound never other than lovely but perhaps
lacking in diversity. And this was a pity in Mvula’s Love Like a Lion, which offered plentiful opportunity for
impassioned colouring of the melody and rhythmic drama, and which invited a
freedom of expression which the BBC Singers did not fully embrace.
The recital opened with Frank Bridge’s strophic setting of Shelley’s
‘Music, when soft voices die’. Though unpublished until 1979, the work was
composed in 1904, the same year that Bridge composed the Three Pieces for
String Quartet and Novelletten for string quartet, and perhaps it
is not too fanciful to hear the beautiful fusion of of four stringed
instruments in the part-song’s seamless vocal blending so wonderful
exploited by the BBC Singers here. If Oramo did not emphasise the way the
hemiola rhythms point the text in the arching, homophonic phrases, then he
did bring to the fore both Bridge’s harmonic intensifications, ‘odours,
when sweet violets sicken’, and the fluid interweaving of the inner parts
in the second strophe, the tenors rising high with ease and creating
forward motion. The diminishing repetitions by sopranos and tenors of the
final line, ‘Love itself shall slumber on’, were grounded with perfect
fixity by the long pedal bass – the deep breathing of peaceful sleep.
Simple, quiet, consoling, but perhaps a part-song more suited to bringing a
concert to a close. The same might be said of Ralph Vaughan Williams’
‘Rest’ (1902), a setting of Christina Rossetti’s sonnet, ‘O Earth, like
heavily upon her eyes’. Oramo skilfully captured the stillness of the first
part of the sonnet, while maintaining forward momentum. The slightest of
pauses before the subito pianissimo on ‘Paradise’, after an
impassioned rise, was magical: ‘With stillness that is almost Paradise.’
The volta pushed forward, the sentiments now more confident, the poet
desirous of union with God.
Holst’s Latin-text Nunc Dimittis for eight-part choir and soprano
and tenor soloists was composed in 1915 for Richard Terry and the choir of
Westminster Cathedral, but largely forgotten until it was published in 1979
in an edition prepared by Imogen Holst. The work shares with the Bridge and
Vaughan Williams a debt to Tudor polyphony, sensed in the use of modality
and antiphonal writing, but Holst’s harmonic language is more
individualised, his engagement with the text more dynamic and sometimes
surprising, as in the lightly tripping ‘Gloria in Patri’. Oramo built up
the layers of the opening phrase persuasively and conveyed the
expansiveness of the writing, with the sopranos bright and pure, and the
lower regions warm and wholesome in tone.
Oramo explained to the audience that he had grown up with the choral
tradition, not so much as a singer himself but as an admirer of the work of
two uncles who were renowned choral conductors. He first encountered Laura
Mvula during his Birmingham years when she was a member of the City of
Birmingham Youth Choir which occasionally shared the stage with the CBSO.
Oramo spoke with conviction about Love Like a Lion, admiring the
way Mvula has engaged with elements from the English choral tradition and
with the three poetic texts by Ben Okri which present different stages and
facets of love.
The simplicity of ‘Like a child’ conveyed innocence, joy and freedom, and
Mvula’s sympathetic text-setting was deeply engaging. ‘I will not die (for
him)’, was more troubled, exploiting dissonances and false relations in
dense, low chordal textures above which the solo soprano climbed to the
stratosphere with starry purity while the baritone responded with resonant
urgency. Homophonic pronouncements, ‘I know the music of the sea,/ It is a
sweet death lullaby to me.’, brought the various elements back together in
slightly restless concord. ‘Love like a lion’ draws on gospel traditions
and though the vocal sound and phrasing were unfailingly beautiful, the BBC
Singers’ rather strait-laced and polite delivery was a little
discomforting; one felt that this music demanded and deserved more visceral
passion.
Hubert Parry’s Songs of Farewell concluded the programme. Parry
began the fourth song, a setting of John Gibson Lockhart’s
‘There is an old belief’, in 1907 but did not complete the set of six
settings of metaphysical texts until 1915, two years before his death. It
was wonderful to hear the six part-songs as a whole group, for they create
compelling momentum as the voices expand from the initial four-part writing
in the first two songs, successively adding a voice and driving towards the
double choir eight-part setting of verses from Psalm 39.
Parry’s snidest critics may have quipped that he could make even a
telephone directory sound devotional, but one would have to be hard of
heart not to respond to Parry’s sensitivity to poetic text in these six
‘motets’, in which he seems to communicate Matthew Arnold’s declaration
that poetry, not religion, could serve as a vehicle for devotional thought
just as much as his own belief that music, not dogma, could inspire
spiritual devotion in an age when religion seemed to have no place.
Oramo’s discerning, sensitive crafting of the musico-poetic forms embraced
both the large-scale structures and the slightest of details. In ‘My soul,
there is a country’ (Henry Vaughan) the angry vigour of the inner lines of
the final verse – ‘Leave, then, thy foolish ranges’ – was marvellously
supplanted by the assurance of homophonic conviction at the close: ‘For
none can thee secure/But One, who never changes,/ Thy God, thy Life, thy
Cure.’ In the following setting of John Davies’ ‘I know my soul hath power
to know all things’, the merest pinching of Oramo’s fingers and flick of
the wrist brought out the clipped sharpness of the poet’s admission, ‘I
know my sense is mocked in everything.’ ‘Never weather-beaten
sail’ (Thomas Campion) had a madrigalian sweetness while the Lockhart
setting was probing and earnest, particularly in the final stanza where
Oramo made the chromatic searching in the final phrase, ‘Earnest be the
sleep,/ If not to waken up.’, intensely telling. After the drama and
dynamism of ‘At the round earth’s imagined corners’ (John Donne), the
delivery of Parry’s setting of ‘Lord, let me know mine end’ was simply
marvellous; Oramo and the BBC Singers truly relished the flexible and
varied choral textures and impassioned counterpoint.
Earlier in the Proms seasons I heard Parry’s Fifth Symphony performed by
the
BBC National Orchestra and Chorus of Wales under Martyn Brabbins
and my rather flippant, and immediately revised, response was ‘Parry trying
to be Brahms’. Here, though, the reference to the German master might be
more valid and certainly no diminishment of Parry’s marvellous achievement
in these songs; for, surely Parry was influenced by Brahms’ Four Serious Songs which he deeply admired, and he selected the
same verse from Psalm 29 that Brahms set in the third part of his German Requiem.
Whatever musical shadows hang over the Songs of Farewell, Oramo
and the BBC Singers offered us far-sighted illuminations of departure and a
consoling Sense of an Ending.
Claire Seymour
Chamber Music Prom 6: The Sense of an Ending
Frank Bridge – ‘Music, when soft voices die’, Ralph Vaughan Williams –
‘Rest’, Gustav Holst – Nunc dimittis, Laura Mvula –Love Like A Lion (BBC co/mmission: world premiere), Hubert Parry – Songs of Farewell; Sakari Oramo (conductor), BBC Singers.
Cadogan Hall, London; Monday 20th
August 2018.
image=http://www.operatoday.com/Sakari%20Oramo%20High%20Res%201%20-%20credit%20Benjamin%20Ealovega.jpg
image_description=Chamber Prom 6, BBC Singers conducted by Sakari Oramo: The Sense of an Ending
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product_title=Chamber Prom 6, BBC Singers conducted by Sakari Oramo: The Sense of an Ending
product_by=A review by Claire Seymour
product_id=Above: Sakari Oramo
Photo credit: Benjamin Ealovega