Sunday 25 August 2024
7.30 pm The Nave Southwell Minster
Alison Rose (soprano), Susan Bickley (mezzo soprano), Mark Padmore (tenor), Frederick Long (bass-baritone), Festival Voices, Festival Sinfonia, Marcus Farnsworth (conductor)
This was a special concert, celebrating ten successful years of the Southwell Music Festival. Before the concert began in a packed Nave, the Dean of Southwell, Nicola Sullivan, said a prayer for the gift of music, highly appropriate as the meaning music was the subject of the first piece. The Festival commissioned a substantial work of around 20 minutes for soprano soloist, choir and orchestra, from the English composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad. Festival Director and conductor Marcus Farnsworth briefly interviewed the composer, who admitted that writing about what music means was ‘terrifying’. The new piece, With What Sudden Joy, is a setting of a text by the poet Kate Wakeling, collated entirely from the words of local people in Southwell in workshops about the power and effect of music. In her programme note, Wakeling said she found these conversations,
“terrifically rich and unexpectedly affecting. They were playful, moving, inventive and uplifting. [We] explored how music connects to ideas of memory and community, how music and silence interact, and how music can, by turns offer us solace and spark a sense of celebration.”
Frances-Hoad revealed that the words were so moving she sometimes found herself ‘weeping at the piano.’ In her programme note she said the words were, ‘specifically tied to Southwell, and yet so universal.’
The soprano solo part, superbly performed here by Alison Rose, was often florid and complex, whereas the choral parts were much simpler, making the work suitable for a choral society to perform with a professional soloist. In his programme note Farnsworth said he has performed in many premieres that have never seen the light of day since, ‘for no good reason.’ His aim here was to commission a new work that, ‘had the potential to become part of the repertoire’, and Frances-Hoad’s has written a piece which deserves to achieve that; accessible, attractive and profound. Eavesdropping amongst the audience at the interval, the consensus was that it was highly successful.
The first movement, aptly named ‘In the Beginning’, began with a sense of expectation from the strings. Rose sang intricate lines at first but also duetted with the choir as they described powerfully resonant shared memories, including the poignant recollection of a grandmother with dementia who could, ‘still remember every note’ of shared songs,
“Everything else had gone
but we sat and sang together
I thought:
this is what music is
These are sounds that travel us back”
The second movement, ‘A Bright Connection’, began with hymn-like chords from the Festival Voices as Rose’s lyrical, golden soprano voice soared above. In a moment of magic at the end, there was a series of invigorating key changes demonstrating the power of music. The central movement, ‘I drove to my Father’s House’ was profoundly moving, about a woman who very suddenly lost her father and was unable to grieve until she went to his house and played his records for, ‘perhaps three solid days…I cried without stopping.’ The fourth movement, ‘Also Silence’ was a chance for individual soloists from the choir to shine, with reassuring chords at the start and gorgeous chromatic harmonies at the end, a statement of the importance of silence in music but also a practical demonstration of how music can move us. The final movement, ‘With What Sudden Joy’ had a title that sounded like a poem by a Romantic poet like Wordsworth or Coleridge. It expressed the sheer, visceral joy of music-making, with dancing, syncopated rhythms and a soprano part that floated stratospherically above. As the closing words stated, ‘a celebration must have music’, and Frances-Hoad’s new work perfectly suited the celebration of 10 years of the Festival.
From a brand new piece to a choral classic written over two hundred years ago, Mozart’s Requiem, which remained unfinished at the composer’s death in 1791. As Libby Burgess said in her programme note, when he died Mozart had written the opening ‘Requiem Aeternam’ and had sketched out choral parts, bass lines and some orchestral parts for the next six movements from the ‘Kyrie’ to ‘Confutatis’. It’s tempting to view the rest of the piece, completed by Franz Süssmayr as a bit of a disappointment, but as Burgess says,
“…history owes Süssmayr a debt of gratitude for completing the work at all. Incomplete, it would probably not have seen the light of day – and we would never have had the experience of knowing it.”
Whatever your views are on Süssmayr’s completion of the work, Farnsworth and his festival forces didn’t allow the energy to drop at any point, even when Süssmayr took over from Mozart. This was a lively, energetic performance informed by the best period instrument practices, fast but always precise even in passages which lesser choirs find hard to negotiate such as the ‘Osanna in Excelsis.’ Farnsworth often brought out instrumental details that are obscured in other performances, and beautifully controlled the dynamics of the richly operatic voices of the choir. There was a fine quartet of soloists with Alison Rose who we heard in the first half, the distinguished mezzo soprano Susan Bickley, the Festival’s Artist in Residence the tenor Mark Padmore, and the young bass-baritone Frederick Long. There were some lovely individual moments from the soloists, and some excellent duets and quartets. The concert ended with the ‘Lux Aeterna’, featuring a fantastic fugue on the words ‘cum sanctis tuis’. There was a huge cheer from the audience, a fitting celebration of ten years of music making in Southwell, with hopefully many more years to come.