JUDITH BINGHAM’s fascinating music drama The Ivory Tree, staged at
St Edmundsbury Cathedral to celebrate the completion of the cathedral’s new
Millennium Tower, was called The Ivory Tower in a slip of the tongue by the
BBC’s Look East programme.
Yet the composer lives in no such fastness.
Her allusive text looks east and west and north, and fuses copious layers:
Church Parable, mummers’ play, the Germanic world tree, biblical allusion, the
Green Man and medieval pageant, the Christian and pagan year, and, most
affectingly, a dreamlike interweaving of the death of Edmund, Saxon king and
martyr, with scenes from the crucifixion, deposition and resurrection of our
Lord.
A strangely evocative work, The Ivory Tree unfolds like an inviting
five-part tapestry, rich in the power of suggestion.
The source of these stylised scenes, central to the work’s inspiration, is
the 12th-century Romanesque cross carved from walrus ivory and known as the
Cloisters Cross or the Bury Cross.
Controversy surrounds it, as to both its origins and its implications, but
its original provenance has been surmised to be the medieval Bury Abbey, whose
ruins lie today about the cathedral. Bury St Edmunds possesses a superbly
detailed replica. The original is in New York.
That The Ivory Tree is something of a collage, in which its elusive
images feed off and enhance one another, is suggested by the composer’s use of
the word “dream” to designate each section presented by means of solo voice,
spoken narration, and choral or instrumental interjection.
Collage can be a synonym for “muddle”; without more detailed elucidation,
someone sitting further back and less able to catch the words clearly might be
forgiven for wondering, as I did amid this stream of cartwheeling images,
whether my mind had not been addled by a modest draught of Abbot, the Suffolk
ale brewed nearby.
It was the presentation that made the evening compelling: these tableaux,
evolved by the director (Ray Dyer), designer (Pauline Judge), and choreographer
(Sarah Franklin), were exquisitely managed, with an eye for fine detail.
Some of the ostensibly simple dances for amateur performers included
kaleidoscopic tracery so subtle, intricate, and unexpected that it spawned its
own beguiling imagery.
The costumes and props, also echoing detail from the Bury Cross, revealed a
fertile imagination.
Judith Bingham’s music, itself intricately patterned, and underpinned by
medieval carol and plainchant, soldered the performance together.
Organ, clarinet and saxophone supplied almost sensual interludes; the
six-part brass was resplendent with echoes of Janácek; and her use of
paired flutes heralding one woodland dance was bewitching.
The baritone Robert Rice found a warmly optimistic characterisation for the
part of the Ivory Carver; and the bass Richard Strivens brought uplifting
intensity to the part of Samson, Abbot of Bury during the Third Crusade, whose
memories and anxious dreams are focal to two main scenes.
The countertenor Timothy Garrard lent marked pathos to the tribulations of
the wounded and doomed Edmund: the royal strength visibly ebbed on stage. His
severed head was curiously paraded by a “dark” wolf figure, like some trophy
from The Golden Bough.
From all this we were meant, I think, to draw refreshed energy, sensing at
many levels, and in compatible pagan and Christian terms, processes of new hope
and rebirth — just as St Edmund’s miraculously uncorrupted, coffin-preserved
body seems to sprout the tree of the title at the close.
I grasped some of it, but by no means all; so whether
The Ivory Tree is more fecund or convolute I’m not sure. But the St
Edmundsbury Choir under James Thomas lifted itself to high standards, and its
vital contributions were enhanced by a subtle lighting effect through gauze.
Overall, this was a mesmerising if mysterious evening, and a joyous tribute
to the gleaming limestone cathedral tower above our heads.