A sensational, spine-tingling evening with the Britten Sinfonia

Telegraph

01-05-2025

This wonderful concert from the Britten Sinfoni a, Sinfonia Smith Square and the Choir of Merton College, Oxford was uplifting on two counts. It was another sign that the classical music world, reeling from the blows of Covid and the evident but never actually stated hostility of Arts Council England, hasn't lost its mojo. This was a big-scale event, composed almost entirely of 20 th -century religious music, put together out of a conviction that unfashionable but great music can attract big audiences – as indeed it did.
As for the music itself it was a wonderful antidote to that all-pervasive soft-centred 'spiritual' music that cosies up to you, in an attempt to persuade you religion is about having warm feelings. There was nothing cosy in this concert. The music was as remotely beautiful as the stars and as stark and chiselled as a block of marble, with only the occasional concession to emotional warmth.
The first piece, Stravinsky 's Symphonies of Wind Instruments seemed to be the odd one out, with no ostensible religious purpose. But the outcries from high winds over soft chanting in the flutes seemed like priests in dialogue, and the austere alternation of different speeds, directed with perfect control by Nicholas Daniel – better known in the musical world as a superb oboist – sounded like the acting-out of some obscure ritual. The final chorale, rising up with suppressed ecstasy into the lofty neo-Gothic spaces of St George's Cathedral, made one's spine tingle.
There were many such spine-tingling moments in the Mass by Stravinsky, where the Choir together with ten wind and brass evoked the ancient Latin liturgy in a way that seemed ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, all at once. It was beautifully shaped by Daniel, who softened the music's severe metronomic tread just enough to let the music speak. In between the Symphonies and the Mass came sacred choral music from Francis Poulenc, a composer who revered Stravinsky but didn't hold feeling at such a long arm's length. One felt the terror in Timor et Tremor and the radiance in Vinea mea electa. The choir under Benjamin Nicholas sang beautifully, but the women seemed somewhat stronger and more secure than the men.
To these feelings were added tenderness in two short pieces by Olivier Messiaen. In one of them, an orchestral arrangement of the early Vocalise-étude, Nicholas Daniel played the soaring melody—a poignant moment, as it marked his last performance as Principal Oboe of the Britten Sinfonia. Finally came Messiaen's Et Exspecto Resurrectionem Mortuorum (And I wait for the Resurrection of the Dead) which feels more like an awe-inspiring evocation of fiery stars and nebulae than anything religious. Daniel made sure the silences between movements felt as vast as the music itself, and he gave space to the deafening gong-strokes and apocalyptic brass in a way that made the cathedral's echoey acoustic seem an advantage rather than a hindrance. Like all the music, the piece became the sounding symbol of something incomprehensible beyond this world.