FROM Pudsey Bear and Children in Need to Wallace and Gromit’s Great British Tea Party, the British are imaginative, adept, and generous in raising money for children’s charities. For children whose lives have been extinguished or affected by war and conflict, a more solemn commemoration took place at St Paul’s Cathedral, with memories of Remembrancetide still fresh in the minds of audience and performers.
This was the first performance of The Cry, a Requiem for a Lost Child by the composer Adrian Snell, a work on a large scale, in some ways resembling War Requiem by Benjamin Britten. The Latin requiem mass provides a background — for which the choir is largely responsible — around which Snell has woven poems and utterances by commentators and victims of those wars and conflicts that killed 20 million children during the 20th century, and have killed three-quarters of a million in the present century.
It also remembers the children who were not killed, but whose lives have been irrevocably changed by war — deprived of homes, parents and families, love, education. . .
This is a subject about which it is easy to become sentimental. The text itself is refreshingly unsentimental, beginning with Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s pre-recorded utterance (the much-publicised “rap”) of Elie Wiesel’s “I belong to a tradition that believes that the death of a single child is a blemish on creation.”
The poems and quotations throughout the rest of the work are not only by well-known children, such as Anne Frank, but by children known only by their forenames, and from more recent conflicts, in Bosnia, Yugoslavia, and Angola.
The principal characters are The Searcher — the male soloist who, in the words of the conductor, David Drummonds, “ravaged by doubt, despair and incomprehension in a world with so much violence, finds answers only in a dawning trust in God and becomes The Searcher after truth”; and The Lost Child — the female soloist who speaks for children, indeed for “every child”, supported by a children’s choir.
The male soloist, Mark Stone, whose baritone voice, velvet-toned and effortlessly even throughout its compass (he won the Decca Prize in the 1998 Kathleen Ferrier Awards), spoke as well as sang, with authority and dignity. The choirs, too — three children’s ensembles and David Drummond’s London Oriana Choir — sang superbly and idiomatically.
Among the instrumentalists, harp (Paula Popa) and oboe (Frances Slack) were particularly fine, as was the cellist of the anonymous string ensemble from the Royal College of Music — as deserving of mention by name as all the named singers, speakers, and choir members in the programme.
My serious reservation concerns the female soloist, 18-year-old Niamh Perry, and the music she was given to sing — blatantly commercial in style and accompaniment, and over-amplified — sentimental Celtic wailings (I speak as a full-blooded Celt) which seemed at odds with the rest of the score, which on Songs of Praise would have me reaching for the volume control. I said that the text is refreshingly unsentimental — alas! The Lost Child’s settings of it are not. Let the words speak for themselves.
From halfway down the nave on the south side, I longed to hear something that was not coming via the sound system. Yes, we needed this for Archbishop Tutu, and for atmospheric noises, such as breathing and rainfall — and the female soloist’s voice, which otherwise would, no doubt, have been all but inaudible (not so the other singers). But this was sometimes so loud that other important parts (the choir’s Dies Irae, for example) passed me by.
In fact, I am still not entirely clear about the relationship between the composer and this piece; for in the printed programme, Adrian Snell thanks David Drummond for “the great skill and sensitivity” with which he “arranged” The Cry for this première. “He has also brought fresh ideas to the composition, including the inclusion of a children’s choir, and has written wonderful new chorus parts for eight of the songs.”
Brave are the souls who have the première of their work in St Paul’s — a vast space to fill. There was, however, a capacity audience, and whatever the flaws in this fascinating piece — and in the acoustic suitability of the building — they were undoubtedly moved by the words and by much of the music, to the immeasurable benefit of Save the Children, which facilitated it.
The performance was introduced (in person) by the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the heroes of the evening were Mark Stone and David Drummond. Lucky composer.
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