JONATHAN RATHBONE was the musical director of the Swingle Singers for almost a decade. He demonstrated his prodigious musical gifts as a choral scholar of Christ’s College, Cambridge, and, before that, as a chorister of Coventry Cathedral. While at the Royal Academy of Music in London, he penned a marvellous children’s musical based on Oscar Wilde’s story The Selfish Giant. A love of Wilde’s writings remains with him to this day.
A packed audience in St Albans Abbey has been treated to a rewarding double première: his setting, for narrator and orchestra (the proficient Sylvan Ensemble) of Wilde’s anguished outpouring “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”; and, in a complete performance, Rathbone’s larger choral work Requiem for the Condemned Man.
The latter presents an unnamed man who, awaiting execution for the murder of a teenage lover (sung by a soprano), is vilified by a brutally judgemental crowd. These evocative passages, written by Paul Whitnall, are interspersed with seven sections of the Missa pro Defunctis, as well as excerpts from the Lord’s Prayer and the Pie Jesu. The cumulative effect is not unlike a Passion narrative, particularly in those sections akin to turbae.
There is a lot of loud music in these passages, which passingly gain from some vigorous writing for brass and (here excellent) tympani and percussion, and the inclusion of saxophone and booming bass guitar, whether independently or mirroring the double-basses. The splendid outburst of the Dies Irae supplied a thrusting piece of music for the energetic large chorus.
Elsewhere, I looked for more subtle differentiation in both text and music. Once the mood of despondency and threat is established, it prevails till near the close, without notable remission. By the Sanctus, Benedictus, and Agnus — movements that offer scope for a varying or lightening of textures, like a scherzo or slow movement — the only new mood lay in hints of sentimentality and slightly pi recanting (“I’m glad to repent, Why can’t you relent And make me a gift of my future?”). These veered towards the less felicitous aspects of a musical without probing deeper. Two attractive quasi-jazz passages failed quite to mesh with the rest.
Surprisingly, neither Barnet Choral Society nor the London Forest Choir (a few sopranos apart) seemed fully abreast of their notes, either here or in some preceding offerings by Fauré (the Pavane, with rather unconvincing words) and Tavener. The composer cuts an impressive figure on the podium. The beat was utterly secure and always sympatheic, if lacking in finessed detail.
Yet I was impressed by the assurance of the orchestral textures and the courageous writing of the twin soloists’ vocal lines, sung by Micaela Haslam (the victim) and the tenor David Morris (the perpetrator); and also certain passages for chorus, betraying a periodic musical mastery that could yet bear rich fruit.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a 20-minute setting with Speaker (Nicholas Garrett), heard just before the interval, revealed not just Rathbone’s seemingly instinctive grasp of musical form and structure, and intelligent building of finely judged climaxes, but much more.
Just as his Mass has hints of Tippett (A Child of Our Time) and Kodály (Psalmus Hungaricus), so the well-controlled textures of this cogent and handsomely played poem-setting suggested welcome, curious parallels: Schoenberg’s searing A Survivor from Warsaw; and the rapt, filled-out orchestral writing of Alban Berg (Lulu, or Der Wein) — noble company.
Rathbone’s Ballad is a patent success. The villain of the evening was the vexing and not so much crude as gratuitous amplification. It added nothing, addled the words, and halved both works’ impact. It would be better dispensed with. |
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