Three Choirs Festival (5):  Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934): The Spirit of England, Op. 80 Gustav Holst (1874-1934): Suite, The Planets Op. 32 Geraldine McGreevy (soprano); Festival Chorus; Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Adrian Lucas. Gloucester Cathedral  10.8. 2007 (JQ)

 

When the programme for the 2007 Three Choirs Festival was published I was thrilled to see that The Spirit of England had been included. I’ve long regarded this as one of Elgar’s finest choral works and its relative neglect never ceases to amaze me. I’ve had the good fortune to sing in several performances of it over the years, often around Remembrance Sunday, and the work, and especially the final movement, never fails to move me.

The work, which lasts for about thirty minutes, sets three poems from the collection of poetry, The Winnowing Fan, which was published in 1914 by Laurence Binyon (1869-1943). Elgar began working on the settings in 1915 but the work was not finally completed until 1917. In his perceptive programme note Anthony Boden quotes the view of Elgar’s biographer, Percy Young that Elgar’s war-time music was characterised  “not [by] patriotism so much as pity.” That’s a judgement with which I wholeheartedly concur and it’s important to keep that view in mind particularly when listening to the first movement,’ The Fourth of August’, much of which can seem, on the face of it, confident and extrovert. However, it’s always seemed to me to be particularly significant that in this movement, Elgar quotes some bars from the Demon’s Chorus in Gerontius, most tellingly of all at the words “Vampire of Europe’s wasted will.” In fact I think it’s perfectly possible to see in the work, as it progresses, a reflection of the change of mood within England itself during the War, moving from the confident patriotism with which the troops were initially dispatched to war in 1914 to the resigned grief of the nation as the mounting casualties hit home. Spirit of England also shows us the two sides of Elgar’s complex character: the superficially confident public man and the introverted melancholic.

Adrian Lucas, Director of Music at Worcester Cathedral, led a performance that brought out very successfully the diverse moods and the profound emotions of this eloquent work. In ‘The Fourth of August’ the music was exposed very urgently at first and later, at the aforementioned passage where the Demon’s Chorus quotations come in, there was an appropriate degree of savagery. After this, the poignancy of “Endure, O Earth!” was well done and Lucas, aided by full-throated singing from the Festival Chorus and soloist Geraldine McGreevy, brought the movement to a grand conclusion.

The second movement, ‘To women’ begins much more gently. Personally I prefer to hear the solos in this movement sung by a tenor – the words are more appropriate to a man – but usually a soprano sings the solos in all three movements and so it was on this occasion. Geraldine McGreevy made a more positive impression on me than she had done earlier in the week in Howells’ Hymnus Paradisi. It seemed to me that Elgar’s broad phrases were better suited to her voice although when singing loud notes above the stave she employs more vibrato than I care to hear. However, in this movement, she produced a lovely quiet top A flat and G at the phrase “but not to fail” and in general I thought her contribution to this movement was very good. The choir also sang with distinction and Lucas, as well as encouraging them to give of their best, brought out a good deal of important orchestral detail. The last two or three pages of this movement were very expressively done.

The finest music in the work, I believe, comes in the final movement, ‘For the Fallen’. Here, inspired by Binyon’s poignant imagery and, no doubt, impelled by his own feelings about the slaughter in France, Elgar produced some of the most moving music in his entire output. The choir sang with great expression at “Flesh of her flesh they were” and a few moments later, at “There is music in the midst of desolation”, Lucas unfolded the music with poignant grandeur, though if he had given the music just a touch more breadth at this point the effect would have been even more overwhelming. There follows a jaunty, martial episode, in which the rhythms were very well articulated, before Elgar sets the famous words “They shall not (sic) grow old” with disarming and moving simplicity. The way this whole passage was performed on this occasion was very moving, increasing in eloquence at “They have no lot in our labour of the day time.” The music then grows ever more intense until a huge and highly emotional climax is attained at the words “Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain.” Adrian Lucas brought this whole passage off superbly and then allowed the music to wind down, over quite a short space of time, to a quiet, meditative close.

This was a splendid and very faithful account of an underrated masterpiece. Coming just a few days after War Requiem it was very good to hear a contrasting but no less effective and eloquent musical testimony to the wastage of war. Incidentally, the juxtaposition of the two pieces was especially appropriate because, I believe, Britten admired Spirit of England. This was to be my final experience of the full Festival Chorus and I was glad, though not surprised, to hear them maintaining the excellent form that they had been in all week.

The Philharmonia gave Adrian Lucas some fine and full-blooded playing in the Elgar. After the interval they came into their own in The Planets. I need to say at the start that my judgement of this performance was adversely affected by a very unfortunate piece of platform arrangement. At previous concerts the orchestral harps had been positioned within the body of the orchestra, to the left of the first violins and behind the seconds. For this concert, however, the pair of harps was placed behind all the first violins at the far left of the platform. This meant that the instruments were literally some six or seven feet away from me. I assumed that this was due to the large forces required for the Holst but, gallingly, when I attended Evensong in the cathedral the next day and saw the platform laid out for Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, the harps had been moved back to their previous place within the orchestra. The effect of this arrangement was that for substantial sections of The Planets – usually the quieter ones – the music was dominated for me and the members of the audience seated in my vicinity by the sound of the harps. This platform positioning was, I’m afraid, very inconsiderate towards some of us in the audience and, to be honest, I don’t see why it was necessary.

With that important caveat out of the way I otherwise enjoyed the performance very much. Adrian Lucas paced Mars very well, choosing a speed that had rhythmic life but wasn’t too fast so that he conveyed the relentless tread of this musical juggernaut very successfully. The climaxes, if somewhat dominated by the percussion section, had huge power. Venus then provided necessary balm for the listener. There were some excellent solos by the woodwind principals, the first horn and by the leader, James Clark. This was one of the movements where I found that the harps were very obtrusive – not the players’ fault – but, so far as I could judge, overall the music was played with delicacy and poetic atmosphere.

Mercury was played with fleet fantasy. Jupiter began with great vitality; this was but one example of the effectiveness of the incisive conducting of Adrian Lucas. When the Big Tune appeared I was delighted – but not surprised - that he eschewed any tendency to wallow in it. Instead, he presented it tastefully, just letting it unfold, and the music was all the better for it. The final statement of the tune had grandeur but no false rhetoric and then the festive opening material returned, played with exuberance and panache.

Saturn is my favourite movement and this performance didn’t disappoint me. It began, as it should, in cool mystery, and then Lucas built the steady processional music most impressively until the towering brass chords at the climax. These were shattering in their intensity. The mysterious, quiet close was very well managed. Uranus was played with splendid brio but I think there’s also an undertone to the music, almost of malevolence and Lucas brought this out well in a dynamic reading. Neptune, though once again suffering from a surfeit of harp sound, was done very well. What imagination Holst displays in this movement! The strange washes of sound and almost disembodied fragments of music tease and ravish the ear. Towards the end Holst adds a wordless female chorus to the texture. On this occasion the ladies were positioned remotely, behind the orchestra and to the conductor’s left. Here the vast spaces and resonant acoustic of the cathedral came into their own. It must be fiendishly difficult music to sing, requiring great skill if the singers are to remain in tune. The ladies were magnificent, singing with eerie, siren-like tone and with unfaltering intonation. The fade-out at the very end was achieved better than I’ve ever experienced it before: I suspect the singers moved gradually from the North transept out into the cloister. However the effect was achieved, it was superbly effective and most atmospheric.

This was a very fine account of Holst’s orchestral masterpiece and the performers deserved the ovation that they received for the audience. I can’t recall seeing Adrian Lucas conduct before but he impressed me very much with a clear, incisive beat and evident command of the score. This is such a well known piece that it can’t be easy to perform it in such a way that it sounds fresh to the audience but that’s just what Adrian Lucas achieved.

This was my last concert of the 2007 Three Choirs Festival and it was a splendid conclusion to my week of concerts in the glorious surroundings of Gloucester Cathedral.

 A Festival Overview

I haven’t been able to attend anything like as many events as I would have liked – one must do the day job sometimes! However, for what they are worth, here are a few reflections on the Festival.

The first bit of good news is that after all the desperately poor weather and the flood emergency in Gloucestershire, the Festival week itself was blessed with fine, mainly sunny weather. I believe most of the concerts have been well attended and so I hope the Festival has been a commercial success. If so that success was deserved, not least because the overall programme was a strong, rich and varied one and even better in actuality that it had appeared in prospect. The advance announcement of the 2008 Festival suggests, to me at least, a programme that is somewhat less enticing overall but perhaps when the detailed programme is available that will not prove to be the case.

The Festival has had one or two hitches to surmount. There was a legacy of the floods in that it was necessary to relocate the fascinating programme offered by the Rodolfus Choir from Tewkesbury Abbey to Cheltenham Town Hall. At least that programme went ahead, albeit in less attractive surroundings and a less congenial acoustic. A much more grievous blow was the sudden indisposition of Vernon Handley, literally a matter of hours before he was due to conduct the Philharmonia in a Thursday afternoon concert. I gather that Andrew Nethsingha stepped in gallantly and conducted the first half of Handley’s scheduled programme but it would have been completely unreasonable to expect him to conduct a rarity such as Bax’s First Symphony. Members of the orchestra came to the rescue, playing some music by Mozart but the loss of a precious opportunity to hear a Bax symphony in concert, and under the baton of his leading interpreter, must have been a massive disappointment to the audience.

At the concerts I’ve attended performance standards have been high and, anecdotally, I understand this has generally been the case throughout the week. The twin backbones of the Festival, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Festival Chorus, have done sterling work. The Chorus has been a vintage group this year, I feel, singing very well indeed whenever I’ve heard them, and attaining the heights in Hymnus Paradisi. All credit to Andrew Nethsingha, Geraint Bowen and Adrian Lucas for preparing them so well.

And finally, as they say.....One amusing little sub plot to the concerts has been the inventiveness and wit shown by the Cathedral clergy, during their introductory remarks, in devising entertaining ways of reminding the audience to ensure mobile phones are switched off. Right at the start the bar was set very high by the Dean, who invoked and adapted verses from the Book of Proverbs in his remarks prior to War Requiem. His colleagues tried their best to match him but didn’t quite succeed and I declare the Dean to be the winner of this friendly little “contest” – by a short head.

So the Three Choirs moves on and the 281^st Festival will begin in Worcester on 2 August 2008. By then Gloucester Cathedral will have a new Director of Music as Andrew Nethsingha now departs Gloucester, after a relatively short stay of only five years, to take over from David Hill as Director of Music at St. John’s College, Cambridge. In his time at Gloucester Mr Nethsingha has effected a marked improvement in the standard of the cathedral choir and he leaves Gloucester with that achievement and also, as the finale to his tenure, the satisfaction of having planned and directed this most stimulating and successful Three Choirs Festival.
 

John Quinn  

  
 

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