Review: Cambridge Music Festival: Theatre of Voices: ‘Arvo Pärt: Berliner Messe’ at Trinity College Chapel
Trinity College Chapel played host on Thursday evening (27 February) to artistic director Paul Hiller’s distinguished vocal ensemble Theatre of Voices, visiting the city as part of the current Cambridge Music Festival and also as part of the 25th anniversary celebrations of the Cambridge Music Conference.
The Conference is an initiative dedicated to music and healing, founded by Elizabeth Carmack in 2000 and responsible, since its inception, for works premiered by an impressive range of high profile musicians sympathetic to the cause.
The first part of the evening contained two premieres, The Tree of Life (UK premier), by Nigel Osborne, and Howard Skempton’s Heraclitus (world premier).
Nigel Osborne, sometime professor of music at Edinburgh University, is known too as an aid worker, using music as a therapy to assist in the care of war-traumatised children.
The Tree of Life is inspired by his time in Lebanon working on a programme for Syrian refugee children.
Members of his preparatory team were invited to bring along objects, each corresponding to a particular team member, and asked to explain how the object related to his/her life.
Osborne has described how each story, seven in all (corresponding to seven movements and remarkable in its individual way), began in his mind to be translated into music – “a symphony of human experience.”
The Tree of Life is essentially celebrating the common man. It focuses not on those who are articulate in the grand manner, but on those who nevertheless have stories to tell, and whose sounds, sometimes only half forming themselves into words, have an important place in music (Osborne employs Western and Arabic musical techniques throughout) and have roles to play in other kinds of artistic expression, too.
The work was in lots of ways, and perhaps deliberately so, something of an unsettling experience, with vocals taking various forms of expressiveness, namely sibilance, plosives, percussiveness, whispers, all akin to the way in which the contemporary ‘beatbox’ genre allows the mouth, lips, tongue and voice to mimic drums and percussive instruments.
Theatre of Voices was particularly ‘eloquent’ in its delivery of this complex-to-perform and at times very moving auditory narrative.
We were then to hear work which had a particular significance for Elizabeth Carmack (founder of the Cambridge Music Conference).
Elizabeth’s late father Murray Carmack had been an admirer of the nineteenth century educator and poet William Johnson Cory and her father’s composition Heraclitus (1973) is a salute to the Victorian poet, most widely known for his poem of that title.
William Johnson Cory’s Heraclitus is a poem about friendship dissolved by death yet persistent and unchangeable in memory.
Heraclitus, the Greek philosopher, held that all things were in a constant state of dissolution and resolvable into the element of fire.
But Johnson Cory’s work belongs to a long tradition of elegy containing many famous poems lamenting a death but rejoicing in the continuation of what has been made immortal by the life.
John Milton’s Lycidas, for example (1637), is his elegy on the premature death (by drowning) of his Cambridge friend and contemporary, Edward King.
Shelley’s Adonais (1821) is his own elegy for the loss of his friend Keats, yet at the same time it is celebrating the young Keats’s immortality as a poet.
Wordsworth in Extempore Effusion on the Death of James Hogg remembers (among others) how “every mortal power of Coleridge… frozen at its marvellous source” remains forever in the immortal legacy of “the only wonderful man I ever knew”.
In a separate inset to the evening’s printed programme, Elizabeth Carmack explained how she had commissioned composer Howard Skempton’s Heraclitus as a commemoration of her father’s 100th anniversary (1920-2008), as an appropriate gesture to her father’s setting of William Johnson Cory’s famous poem, and equally to affirm solidarity with those who had been victims of extreme homophobia, both historically and in more recent times (Elizabeth’s stepbrother had died of AIDS).
After a short interval we heard a performance of Arvo Pärt’s Berliner Messe, which had been premiered by the Theatre of Voices in St Hedwig’s Cathedral, Berlin, in May 1990, only six months after the fall of the Berlin Wall (9 Nov, 1989).
The Mass begins with the deeply reverential Kyrie, with some dissonance adding mystery to the prayer (in Greek) for Christ and his Father to have mercy on their supplicants.
The following Credo is a lovely sequence reaching the sublime heights of spirituality and, as is typical of the composition as a whole, the full chorus is employed in the other-worldly tones of the Gloria, while the ‘Alleluias’ and the ‘Agnus Dei’, each in a very slow delivery, enfold in turn the gently swaying rhythm of the Veni Sancte Spiritus.
Bells played an important role in the music of prominent Russian figures such as Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov, and Estonian composer Pärt is known for his own use of a distinctive bell-like compositional technique.
‘Tintinabuli’ is a plural onomatopoeic word for ‘bells’ in Latin and in Pärt, from what he himself has said about it, they seemed to have drawn him closer to accessing something unified or unifying, as in the way a prism collects the polychromatic spectrum into white light for example, or perhaps as the Trinity is conceived as forming one God from a coalescence of three persons.
Pärt’s quest for oneness is reminiscent of the poet Coleridge’s similar search: “What is the world else but an immense heap of little things?
“My mind feels as if it ached to behold and know something great – something one and indivisible.”
Theatre of Voices’ performance brought us close to experiencing something of what is essentially a religious dimension in music, and to a sound in Pärt’s compositions which locate them firmly within the eminent traditions of Russian and Eastern Orthodox Church music.
This concert was very well attended and two of the composers, Nigel Osborne and Howard Skempton, were there to receive their applause (and a single rose each from Elizabeth Carmack).
Vocalists and instrumentalists alike were notable: organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, who had worked closely with Pärt in the course of eight decades, was a wonderful (still performing) presence, as was Syrian-born oud player Rihab Azar.
The sounds and sights of Africa were delightfully captured in a mesmerising piece called Walking Song by Kevin Volans, and proceedings concluded with another piece by Howard Skempton, the lyrical More sweet than my refrain.
Although proceedings were very atmospheric with some truly wonderful sounds, a couple of quibbles only. It could be argued that the evening was a little over-ambitious for one and a half hours.
Frustratingly, the very detailed and admirably-produced concert programme was rendered almost unusable as there was hardly any light to read by. It was important to have these details on the night?
Also rather puzzling was the delivery of the Arvo Pärt Mass from the back of the chapel.
As this was probably what had drawn in the crowds, the star of the advertised concert got somewhat dimmed, ‘lost’ among the constellations of distracting mobile phone torches, and with the audience uncertain of where to locate their attention.
Otherwise, there were very rich and rewarding performances throughout.
