Like the stately procession of figures across a Renaissance town clock (and even Mr Fortnum and Mr Mason have admiring viewers in Piccadilly) the music events roll by in the church each year. And, now the tradition of Requiem performances is firmly established, it is, in fact, four years since the last Brahms.
The down side to having really good professional singers in our choir is that other people tend to think so too, and they get offered work, which means they’re not always around. So this year we had Philippa Boyle, an experienced soprano, totally unknown to me, who had the one big solo, while baritone Hugo Hermann-Wilson, equally unfamiliar to me, gave powerful performances in the baritone solos.
We had, as previously, the two-piano version of the accompaniment. When we had the work before Peter Foggitt, who now directs our music, was brought in to be one of the two. I’m afraid I prefer the work to have an orchestra, but that is not say that Elspeth Wyllie and David Smith did not give their all. There were twice as many women as men in the choir, but the balance remained good. This time the work was sung in German, rather than English last time, and watching as a professional linguist, some people had to try hard, but the overall effect was really good.
It soon became clear that Peter Foggitt has a magic touch of getting his choir to sing softly – a real PP. And where they returned to the FF repeat in All flesh is grass, it was really quite scary. This has got to be Northern Choral Music – you wouldn’t expect a French or Italian composer to have written it, and there are places where it looks forward to Mahler.
As ever, How lovely are thy dwellings was – lovely – and the chaos expressed later was – chaotic. All this is compressed into just about one hour.
I have said before that the piece is just the right length. Brahms has got his point across and probably used all the different musical colours that suit the texts, using the Lutheran Bible, that he has chosen.
I’ve already mentioned the choir’s soft singing, and it was the best I’ve heard in any of the Requiem performances so far – and I’ve heard then all!
World War I is now taught in history courses and is of course a major historical event. But we are all living in history, and particularly because so many very young men needlessly died, they did not have normal life spans which would have brought it all very much closer. There is certainly a group in the congregation, and no doubt in the audience, who were born less than 20 years after it ended, and we’re still very much around. World War II having followed so horribly soon after, plenty of people have first hand accounts of childhood, or being a teenager, at that time. And still there are wars, and rumours of wars – always – somewhere. We can only be grateful for peace here, or relative peace, as we have young men in London fighting and killing each other in “wars” they have invented, every day, as I write.
Deutsches Requiem
Suzanne Pinkerton