"At the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, World War I – the Great War – ended."
~ Author: Oberon
Sunday November 11th, 2018 - This evening, at All Souls Church, Musica Viva NY and the New Orchestra of Washington marked the 100th anniversary of the end of World War I with a beautiful and deeply moving program. The acoustic at All Souls is a marvel: voices fill the air with effortlessly wonderful sound, and experiencing Maurice Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin there gave me the sensation of sitting among the musicians. This immediacy gave the entire program a feeling of intense involvement.
Opening the concert, somewhat surprisingly, was an air by Radiohead honoring the memory of the longest-surviving soldier to serve in the Great War: Harry Patch (photo, above), who died in 2009 at the age of 111. Harry Patch (In Memory Of) begins eerily but soon develops a lovely lyricism. The orchestra plays a repetitive rhythmic phrase while tenor Shawn Bartels takes on the high-lying vocal line, showing fine use of piano/pianissimo. Passion rises, subsides, and then the music goes deep. The song ends on a long-sustained note with a slightly dissonant accompaniment.
Ravel's Tombeau de Couperin, so familiar to me from the Balanchine ballet of the same title, was given what can only be described as a gorgeous performance by the New Orchestra of Washington. Maestro Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez drew rich, warm sounds from the musicians: the strings are splendid, the solos wind players excellent (notably Stephen Key, oboe, and Lillian Copeland, English Horn), the harpist (Eric Sabatino) sublime. You've heard the term "surround-sound" - this is it!
Above: Cecil Coles
Not listed in the program today, an organ work by Cecil Coles - Cortège - was played by organist Trent Johnson as the singers of Musica Viva NY made their entrance. Coles (born in Scotland in 1888) became an assistant conductor at the Stuttgart Opera, and was the organist at St. Katherine's Church in that city. At the onset of the Great War, Coles signed up immediately and joined the Queen's Victoria Rifles, serving as the regimental band-leader. While on active service, Coles continued to compose, sending manuscripts back to Gustav Holst in England. On April 26, 1918, Coles was killed by a German sniper while retrieving bodies of fallen comrades from the field. He is buried in the British Military Cemetery at Crouy. Hearing Coles' music today sends me on a search mission for more.
With the black-clad choristers in place - each wearing a red poppy, for remembrance - a performance of a work new to me - Gustav Holst's Ode to Death - was devastating in its power and eerie expressiveness. It was composed the wake of World War I. Though he himself received a medical exemption from military service, Holst had composer-friends who served (Ralph Vaughan Williams) and died (George Butterworth) at the Western Front. The text of Ode to Death comes from a section of Walt Whitman’s 1865 elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” which was originally written in mourning the death of President Abraham Lincoln.
Harpist Eric Sabatino opens the work, with the chorus intoning the word "Come!" on a sustained tone. Marvelous harmonies abound, both from the instrumentalists and the singers, as the music expands, then subsides. Harp and basses inaugurate a march-like song, the timpani sounding and the organ maintaining a spiritual connection. The music turns rapturous, then amplifies again before ebbing to the sound of bells, and a lyrical song. Chimes are heard, Conor Nelson's flute summons the chorus sopranos, who sing with the harp. High violins brush the heavens, over plucked violas and celli. The music becomes cosmic - cinematic - only to dissolve into the ethereal, with harp and bells, and the chorus softly issuing a last summons on a prolonged, fading note: "Come!" A chilling moment.
Above: composer Joseph Turrin
The second half of the program was given over to American composer Joseph Turrin's cantata And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair, a co-commission by Musica Viva NY, the New Orchestra of Washington, and the Washington Master Chorale. It's a magnificent work, drawing for its texts on the writings of the 'War Poets', some of them famous, some forgotten.
While putting us in mind of the great choral masterpieces of Elgar, Howells, and Parry, as well as of Vaughan-Williams' Sea Symphony and - of course - of Britten's War Requiem, Mr. Turrin's epic cantata shows his own excellence in writing music - both moving and finely-crafted - for instruments and voices alike. And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair deserves a place of pride in the repertory of choral groups worldwide.
A tumult of bells and chimes opens the cantata, followed by a dirge. Rich harmonies are developed in the first poem/movement: Let us remember Spring will come again - May 1915, by Charlotte Mew. While the poem offers hope to the bereaved, the poetess herself eventually committed suicide.
Rousing and passionate, commencing with with Chris Carrillo's trumpet, Rejoice, Friends! That we are alive (poem by Bruno Frank) has a syncopated feel and grows in amplitude.
Siegfried Sassoon's Bombardment is thoughtful and gloomy, with Mr. Nelson's flute sounding forlorn. There is a powerful build-up, then a false calm surrounds the poem's final lines:
"The fifth day there came a hush;
We left our holes
And looked above the wreckage of the earth
To where the white clouds moved in silent lines
Across the untroubled blue."
An anonymous poem, At the Front, is propelled by the snare drum's marching beat. A thoughtful interlude, with flute and clarinet, as the soldiers wonder if they'll survive the war - and the rain - before the drum strikes up again and they all march away.
A career soldier's song - I am the Division Commander - is a lively, rhythmic setting of Alfred Lichtenstein's poem in which the officer states: " Would that there were an endless war..." It's a song loaded with irony.
Another Sassoon poem is the setting of Soliloquy - The Last Meeting. Poignant strings and a passage of wordless vocalise set the mood for the devastating opening lines: "I know that he is lost among the stars, and may return no more but in their light..." The clear, lyric soprano of Laura Choi Stuart carries the solo lines, and Conor Nelson's flute brings a glimmer of light to the song's end.
Wilfred Owen, whose poetry Britten brought to the fore in his War Requiem, wrote Anthem for Doomed Youth. Joseph Turrin's use of parlando for the chorus here is powerful, as drums and bells provide a rocking syncopation. The violins sound restlessly, before a crashing end.
In Flanders Fields, to the cherished verses of John McCrae, is spine-tingling in its atmospheric use of the chorus's women singing in unison as concertmaster Rachel Shapiro weaves in ravishing violin passages. The women harmonize, then return to unison. The song reaches its dreamy end, leaving us bereft.
A tumultuous orchestral interlude gradually winds down to the sound of the flute, and a fading march.
The human toll of war is vast and tragic, but in his poem Poor Dogs, Albert-Paul Granier movingly brings to mind the fate of domesticated canines, left lost and masterless by war's devastation. Set as an a capella hymn, this was one of the most moving parts of the cantata because it's something we'd likely never think about, really. It gives fresh meaning to the phrase "the dogs of war..." Another Grenier poem, The Mortars, is huge and urgent.
Those who have seen the film Testament of Youth will be familiar with Vera Brittain: poetess, wartime nurse, activist. Her Elegy/Perhaps bears the burden of loss, the poem sung as a haunting lullabye by mezzo-soprano Barbara Dever. Ms. Dever, whose powerful performances of Amneris and Ulrica at The Met I fondly recall, sings softly over poetic, restless undercurrents from the strings. The singer touches fleetingly on deep, burnished low tones; her singing is moving and sincere.
In the end, Mr. Turrin returns to Let us remember Spring will come again, the Charlotte Mew poem heard at the cantata's start. The music gets quite grand, but quietens as it reaches its end. The words of the poetess now seem full of resignation: "At one with Love, at one with Grief, blind to the scattered things and the changing skies."
I left the church and walked across Central Park in the fading twilight. Many memories filled me: memories of people now lost to me thru death, or - worse - thru fate.
~ Oberon