Lammermuir Festival: Tenebrae
Another visit to Haddington for the Lammermuir Festival, and another magnificent concert. I was slightly trepidatious about the programme the fine vocal ensemble, Tenebrae, was offering, a selection of pieces the oldest of which were written in 1945. This is often a recipe for a small audience listening to difficult music as a sort of punishment for the 20th century’s reaction to tonality and Romanticism. Not a bit of it! A very decent- sized audience turned up, and we were treated to an aural feast of largely new music (two world premieres) by a group at the absolute peak of their powers.
Founded in 2001 by Nigel Short and Barbara Pollock, Tenebrae has established itself as one of the top vocal ensembles in the world. I have known Nigel for nearly 30 years now, first as a singer (he sang with the King’s Singers and the English Concert as a countertenor), and more recently as director of Tenebrae. He has moulded his group into a strikingly polished small choir, with superb singers throughout the voice ranges, with a core group, regularly added to by younger voices. They even have a system of associate artists, where young singers can be fitted seamlessly into the group, allowing both variety of sound and marvellous training opportunities. Like last week’s concert by the Gesualdo Six, I was particularly taken with the extremities of the ensemble sound, with good resonant basses and ethereal high sopranos, and the middle bits were no less excellent.
The whole concert was interspersed with atmospheric readings by the fine actress Juliet Stevenson of poems by Emily Dickinson. Neither the programme nor the context explained why these readings took place, and that would have been helpful. The new work by Josephine Stephenson, ‘Into the Wreck’, which, with Poulenc’s ‘Figure Humaine’, formed the heart of the concert, has readings as part of its concept, and I assume it was decided to keep to this format throughout. Ms Stevenson read the poems superbly, and certainly created an atmosphere whereby we could take in the meaning of the music we heard. Emily Dickinson’s main poetic themes of death and immortality brought home the message of much of the concert, the reaction to war, and humanity’s eternal ability to revive after even the most awful experiences. The pieces by Mauersberger, Poulenc, Stephenson and Moore all relate to the survival of hope after darkness, whether the darkness of war or women’s reaction to patriarchal society.
Forming a pair of bookends to the concert was the world premiere of Roderick Williams’s work, ‘Lucis Creator Optime’, the words taken from the service of Compline, the final office of the day in the Christian tradition of canonical hours. Intended as a processional and recessional piece, whereby the singers emerge from the shadows to form a choir, both vocally and actually, and disperse at the end, I assume that Covid restrictions about moving around with compulsory mask-wearing scuppered the original intent, as the choir was in place for the first reading before starting to sing. Nonetheless, it turned out to be a very interesting work, growing out of whispers and sighs into a B Minor tonality which was very beautiful and touching. It established the quality of Tenebrae’s sound from the beginning and revealed a composition of creative intelligence. I have known Roderick Williams for many years. We first sang together in the Endellion Festival in Cornwall in a concert version of Britten’s ‘Peter Grimes’, conducted by Richard Hickox, and we have sung many times on the same stage. He has, of course, established himself as one of Britain’s finest baritones, in particular as an excellent Lieder singer, and I knew that he had dabbled in composition from the beginning, but I didn’t realise how good a composer he was. As well as a fine singer and composer, he is an extremely nice chap, which in some way excuses his outrageous success in everything he touches! We are all deeply envious. Roddy, we salute you!
Rudolf Mauersberger (1889-1971) wrote his motet ‘Wie liegt die Stadt so wüst’ (How lonely sits the city) at Easter in 1945, just a month after his city, Dresden, was destroyed by allied bombs at the end of the Second World War. The words, originally used to describe God’s destruction of Jerusalem, have been slightly altered to act as a lament for his beautiful city. Nothing can excuse what the Nazi regime did, but the allied bombing of Dresden was an awful act, and this deeply moving piece, beautifully and sonorously sung by Tenebrae, evoked feelings of sorrow and pity for all those affected innocently by war.
Francis Poulenc’s great composition for choir, ‘Figure Humaine’, was written in the same year as the Mauersberger piece, 1945, and dealt with a similar emotion. Paul Éluard’s eight poems were smuggled to Poulenc by the French Resistance, and the score was also shipped clandestinely out of France so that it could be premiered in London in March 1945. The poet was one of the founders of Surrealism and, as such, was a bitter opponent of Nazism, and his subversive poetry was a beacon to many of the Resistance. Poulenc set eight poems, climaxing with the great epic ‘Liberté’. The work is enormously complicated and multi-faceted and is a severe test of any chorus. Tenebrae gave a magnificent performance, seeking out all the details of this exceptional score. The final cry of Liberty, with a solo soprano singing a top E (Brava! Victoria Meteyard!) was stunning.
The other major work in this programme was a new composition written specially for Tenebrae by the young French-British composer, Josephine Stephenson, ‘Into the Wreck’, a meditation in many languages on the collection of poetry written in 1974 by Adrienne Rich, lamenting the place of women in poetry and literature, and their struggle against a patriarchal society. It is interspersed with readings, again by Juliet Stevenson (no relative of the composer), presumably by Rich. The programme information didn’t confirm the author, so I am making assumptions here. The piece was fascinating and held the audience’s attention throughout. According to her biography, Ms Stephenson is multi-talented, working in several genres, and this work highlights many of her compositional skills.
Unfortunately, this extremely difficult and concentrated programme, with no intervals or breaks (for Covid safety reasons), proved too much for one unfortunate male singer, who fainted halfway through. Having determined that he was all right, Tenebrae continued the performance from approximately where they had stopped, but the flow was interrupted. The work will be repeated in Derry and at London’s Wigmore Hall. Look out for it, and for Josephine Stephenson.
The penultimate work was a setting of three prayers by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, an outspoken opponent of the Nazis who was executed not long before the end of the war. The music was written by Philip Moore (born 1943), using an English translation of the Bonhoeffer prayers. This was also a very moving work, beautifully performed by Tenebrae, with a substantial alto solo. The decision not to give us the texts (we had all the other texts in multiple languages available online) was in my view a mistake. The programme notes said that the decision to set the words in English would allow the audience to fully understand, but, with the best will in the world, choral texts, sung at different times, are largely unintelligible and I would have preferred to have the words in front of me.
I have one more tiny grouse, and it is not with either Tenebrae or Lammermuir, but why do all actors’ biographies have to be so dull? You see it in all theatres, and it is obviously a tradition, perhaps to keep the actor’s personality separate from his/her character. But a list of plays, films and television appearances, which was what we had for Juliet Stevenson, and seems to be standard for actors, is about as interesting as the phone book. Singers and musicians have interesting background information in their biographies (sometimes verging on the narcissistic, but that’s another story), and it would be lovely for actors who appear with musicians to give their audience more insight into their careers. Just saying!
This exceptional concert ended with the Recessional part of Roderick Williams world premiere ‘Lux Creator Optime’, which I enjoyed very much, although wishing for the aural fading of the sound which an actual physical procession out would have given us.
So, another splendid concert at the Lammermuir Festival for me. What a joy!
