Songs of Wars I Have Seen
Queen’s Hall - 12/10/23
Composed by Heiner Goebbels | Musicians from the Dunedin Consort, and Royal Scottish National Orchestra | Ellie Slorach, Conductor
It is October 12, 2023 and thoughts of war lie heavy on the audience. In many ways apt timing but, given the quiet humour of some of this piece, the composer expressed some reservations about timing agreed several months previously. I for one was glad to hear it now.
This is a rare thing, a truly moving modern composition. Commissioned by the Southbank Centre and premiered in 2007 by the London Sinfonietta and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment. For this performance we have musicians from the RSNO and the Dunedin Consort. The musicians perform on both period and modern instruments, the composer’s contemporary music mixing successfully and pleasingly with Matthew Locke’s early eighteenth century score written for Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’. The musicians speak text from the wartime diaries of Gertrude Stein, describing everyday life in Vichy France, where she lived with the American cookery writer Alice B Toklas. She writes from an unselfconsciously female perspective, describing her domestic situation – “we always eat honey in a war – sugar is the first to run out, then butter” against a backdrop of privation and unpredictable violence. She meets with friends in the afternoon to read the plays of William Shakespeare – ‘Julius Caesar’, ‘Macbeth’, ‘Richard III’, and it is just the same – personal ambition, arbitrary violence, all is just the same. “There is no glory to be won; it is very terrible and this is just like that”.
The female perspective is reflected in the position of the musicians, with the female players (all from The Dunedin Consort) seated at the front, and the male players at the rear. The female readers are chosen from amongst the female musicians at the beginning of rehearsal – avoiding the use of actresses, who would add in the director’s view another unnecessary layer of interpretation. At first we looked for speakers, but then saw the readers scattered amongst the musicians at the front of the stage – it was brilliantly performed, interfering with neither sense, clarity nor musical performance.
Ellie Slorach is on this evidence a very fine conductor, managing a complex concert of so many musical, sound and spoken elements with great mastery. In this she was brilliantly supported by an unnamed but very skilled sound engineer and of course nineteen very fine musicians. If anyone is to be singled out it must be RSNO’s Christopher Hart, whose trumpet solo movingly marked the end of the war.
To end with the issue of timing, it is difficult to avoid the reflection that despite Gertrude Stein’s assertion war is not wholly as it always has been. This is a female perspective on war, and one coloured by privileged status. On this island I am tempted to say ‘war from a Hampstead drawing room’ – but maybe more fairly and accurately to say from a protected rural corner of Vichy France. Stein and Toklas were after all twoJewish American women, who were both privately advised by French officials to leave the country in 1944. They refused and survived. One suspects that, for all the common ground this thoughtful and moving piece undoubtedly evokes, the women of Israel and Gaza, not to mention much of the Ukraine, might have a somewhat different story to tell.
