WHILE concentrating on music for the liturgy and
anthems for services, the annual London Festival of Contemporary
Church Music, which has taken up the torch from Michael Nicholas's
high-achieving (formerly triennial) celebrations in Norwich
Cathedral, has matched him by finding a place for larger works of
musical importance.
St John's, Waterloo - its six-pillared Greek-style
Wellington-era frontage by Francis Octavius Bedford faces Waterloo
Station and the London Imax Cinema - is now home to the successful
and versatile Southbank Sinfonia, founded by Simon Over. But it was
the (London) Jupiter Orchestra who took over this space for the UK
première of Gregory Rose's new cantata or music-theatre workDanse
Macabre.
The acoustic, in a light and breezy interior
redesigned by Ninian Comper and enhanced by a Hans Feibusch mural,
proved hugely satisfying. The Exultate Singers, an exciting, surely
national-standard ensemble from Bristol, and some snappy young
vocal soloists from the Trinity Laban Conservatoire (now in
Greenwich and Deptford) were conducted by the composer.
Why isDanse Macabre, which received its world
première in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2011, and is based on a medieval
painting in the Niguliste (St Nicholas Church) off the main square
there, so powerful?
It starts from the graphic, visual material that
inspired Gregory Rose to compose the work in the first place. The
painting - there is an even fuller variant version to be found in
Lübeck in North Germany - is by Bernt Notke (c.1435-1509), a
recognised Renaissance master. It has a magnetic power because it
depicts the figure of Death, a hauntingly beckoning, almost
comically threatening, sometimes prancing skeletal figure,
addressing the rich and powerful - king, emperor, bishop, priest,
etc. - and warning them that earthly pomp cannot protect them from
the inevitable.
A great choral work needs a text, and Rose's
achievement is to have linked in to the work not just a large part
of theMissa pro Defunctis, but a series of texts from a century
earlier in which the lordly "victims" simper and cower and beg to
be spared - or, in some cases, brazenly assert their authority and
demand their rights. Some of these were impressively sung: the
King, for example (Ashley Mercer); or the forcefully sung Emperor
(Casey-Joe Rumens), soaring over the orchestra. Best of all, the
skull-like Death himself (Simon Dyer), a singer of ability and
characterising power.
This score is riddled with fine, even electrifying
touches, and telling colourings, such as sensational use of
woodwind or of percussion (including some notable teasings-out of
marimba), much of which Rose uses to sustain the hefty
contributions from the chorus. The double-bass solo after the
King's demise is as haunting as the viola da gamba in Bach'sSt
Matthew Passion, and reminds us that part of the composer's skill
is to have turned all these hapless victims' grisly ends into a
kind of sequenced "Passion".
To address something as weighty as the complete
requiem text might seem quite enough; to intersperse it with a
complete psychological drama, or at least a series of quite
distincttableaux(the bittiness of the text might seem to some a
drawback; to me thetableauapproach is part of the work's great
success), so that the dramas work in a kind of emotional
counterpoint, strikes me as astonishingly forceful and
original.
There was too much worth praising in this brave,
richly detailed new work with its sinister undercurrents. But three
things seem certain.
The performances, in every department were nigh-on
first-rate. The work merits - would respond well to - a
full-blooded staging, with a director and designer (such costumes
as there were here were perfectly good), and above all, dance, to
make it really aDanse Macabre. But, third, these paintings, Notke's
"double" German-Estonian masterly panels, are as haunting as the
most sinister Grünewald or Dürer. The quality and challenge of
these medieval images is matched, time and again, in this awesome
new music-theatre piece. On these grounds alone, and for the depth
to which it is rooted in our culture,Danse Macabreshould be taken
up by serious companies at home andacross Europe alike.