Al WIC
Week at Westminster
y ISTENING music in Westminster Abbey-
Ldand we spent much time there last week, whge six sizeable choral-orchestral concerts marked the .ibbey's ninth centenary—is a chancy business when works are performed that depart -from the stately polyphonies to which the high- vattiked nave is best suited. But what was Douglas Oka to do? As the Abbey's Master of Music, it Wes he who directed this commemorative iomage. As well as conducting much of the lestilal with taste. penetration and skill, he was presunii'ibly its chief planner. A scheme more or less tied to the Tudor church composers and their continental fellows would have been so like a week of Sundays as to muff the occasion completely. Accordingly, there were excursions into other idioms, times and territories.
The most successful (or least unsuccessful) of the at the four concerts which I attended were, in declining order, the lively, luminous Messa Concermia of Francesco Cavalli, a seventeenth- century Venetian who wrote for St Mark's in a manner related to that of Monteverdi. the Te Deunt of Berlioz. Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, and The Dream of Gerontius. If 1 do not include Verdi's Quality) Pezzi Sacri—which, as sung by the Ambrosian Singers under Mr Guist, came over reasonably well—that is be- cause to my taste (criminally limited, no doubt) these pieces or the greater part of them are so tame in texture. sentiment and thematic material that they can never really be successful in any sense. They always have me hankering after the solaces and grandeurs of the Verdi Requiem. Am I alone in finding that the Pezzi smell faintly of cassocks, mothballs and presbytery parlours? - 'Whether the choir on duty was the Ambro- sians or the Bach Choir or the Schatz Choir or the )3BC Chorus, it never numbered much over a hundred and was usually smaller. Good acoustical tactics, I'm sure. All sang from a tribune up against the organ screen, with the orchestra immediately below them and the audi- ence spreading back towards the West Door. an arrangement that left more than half the Abbey unoccupied and resonating.
The Cavalli Mass is another Raymond I_ ep- pard 'realisation,' and it was he who conducted. Less glittering in the nature of the case than his conjectural scoring of Monteverdi's Orfeo and PIncoronazione. the work is texturally as fascinating. among other reasons for its permu- tations of eight solo voices, disposed as a double quartet on opposite sides of the aisle, against a background of antiphonal choirs. But the essence of the work is the strength and range
of Cavalli's line and, beyond these, dramatic tensions that almost turn a Mass setting into Passion Music. Between the muscular opening statement of the Kyrie and the concluding Agnus Dei, so spacious and calm, there are outright jollities in triple time for the jubilation of the text and, when it comes to the central mysteries, Incarnation and Crucifixion, a compelling hush and droop of harmonies.
To all this the Abbey reverberation was kindly and cushioning. So it was to other scored--in part. Conducted by Mr Guest, Gerontius bloomed and gleamed magnificently whenever the choir and the LSO's heavy brass and trumpets had the right acoustical chance. There were surprises, too. From where I sat the Angel of Mercy (Roger Stalman) got through tutti pressures better than sometimes happens in the concert hall. As may be imagined, however, the Demon music and other high dynamics verged on &lig- ging confusion, the whole half-drowned by kettle- drum tone. A similar mixture of acoustical bad and good marked Antal Dorati's concert ,two nights later with BBC forces. In the Symphony of Psalms such drastic pages as the brusque, ejaculatory opening of the Laudate section were blurred and boneless. The Laudate's sublime closing section, on the other hand, was so truly balanced and upborne that from the first bars I dreaded the moment when sublimity should reach full close.
With the Abbey again his coadjutor rather than foxer, Mr Dorati gave equal truth, as well as intimidating splendour, to the monumental finale, `Judex crederis,' of the Berlioz Te Deum. It's true that few of the words came over. Few did at any of the concerts. This made near- fiasco of two Britten pieces, Voices of Today and the Cantata Misericordium, which depend at least as much for their shape and emotional punch upon words as upon music. We had the printed texts, Latin and English, under our noses, true. Even so, it wasn't always easy in the general syllabic mush to pick up what was being sung at any given moment. The only sure way of not losing touch was to keep our eyes glued to the words from start to finish. Unhappily, when one does this purely musical values tend to take a back seat in the mind.
CHARLES REID
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