Words of faith
RODNEY MILNES
Just as Britten elicited a strong emotional response in his War Requiem by combining words from the Christian liturgy with war poems by Wilfrid Owen, so has John Tavener in his Celtic Requiem, where fragments of the same liturgy are used as background to child ren's games and songs concerned with death. Any similarity stops there : Taveri er's piece is much shorter (just twenty-five minutes), it is written for the stage, and the musical language is altogether more primitive, rightly and engagingly so.
Musically, the whole piece is related to the chord of E flat major, and it says much for the composer's ingenuity that he can get away with this without any suggestion of tedium. Vivid orchestration is a help (the forces include giant humming tops, bagpipes and popguns) and so, of course, are the running interjections of the children's chorus, whose raw comments on the omnipresence of death in the form of parodied nursery rhymes and hymns are so artlessly profound. In terms of the Christian faith, the lines "Mary had a little lamb/Her father shot it dead" are pretty shattering, and the apparently anticlimactic follow-up (" And now it goes to school with her/Between two chunks of bread "), when you consider the church's ritual, is scarcely less so. It is strange that a work that goes straight to the heart of religious experience should ever have been considered blasphemous.
The new recording by Apple (SAPCOR 20) with the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton is first-rate. Mercifully there is no hint of choir-school daintiness about the Great Missenden Village School boys and girls, whose lively junketings encompass the death of Jenny Jones, the courtship rituals associated with funerals, and the consolation of mother Mary. The Sinfonietta orchestra and chorus provide
\the solid background of sound against
which the games take place, and there is much expert warbling in the highest reaches of the soprano range (real Queen of the Night ' territory) by June Barton.
The other side contains two extracts from Tavener's Last Rites, a large scale work-in-hand : ' Nomine Jesu,' in which that name is sung while speakers recite passages from the good book in a variety of languages, both topped, like some religious sundae, with verses from St John of the Cross; and Coplas, a setting of words by that same divine mingled with a tape of the Crucifixus ' from Bach's Mass in B Minor — an idea that sounds much better than it reads.
In its third release (HDND 19-22) the Decca Haydn Symphony marathon moves to rather more familiar ground with symphonies Nos 49 to 56. The first, La Passione, is given a suitably weighty reading by Dorati and the Philharmonia litingarica, though some may find the first movement a bit too slow for the shape of the tunes to emerge. In his lively notes, Robbins Landon argues convincingly that No 50 was the piece to greet Maria Theresa on her 1773 visit to Esterhazy rather than the accepted 48; it is a rather hollow piece — Haydn was seldom at his best on official occasions. No 51 is one of those genial middle period works with jokes, two trios and a rondo finale (a bit sluggish here). Nos 52 and 56 are two of the greatest Sturm und Drang ' pieces and the Andante of No 53 is the one that topped the charts in the 1780s, and you can see why. No 54 is a fine example of Haydn's mind over ordinary matter, and No 55, known as 'The Schoolmaster in Love,' is exquisitely brought off. This worthy project continues to gather momentum.
It is some way from the tough musical intellect of Papa Haydn to the easy genius of the young Schubert. The nickname ' Tragic' for his Fourth Symphony is always puzzling. Apart from the opening thirty bars it seems about as tragic as spring flowers, especially in a performance as winning as that by Kertesz and the Vienna Philharmonic (SXL 6483). Strangely enough, the more overtly carefree Fifth is marginally less successful, though the playing throughout is all we have come to expect from this band, and the record matches Kertesz's fine versions of the Unfinished and the Great C Major.
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