Nyman stirs thought and pathos

Michael Nyman’s War Work

Barbican

★★★★ ★

Is man an embodied soul or just a machine made of flesh? That was the uncomfortable question lurking behind Michael Nyman’s

War Work, composed to mark the centenary of the First World War, which was given its UK premiere at the Barbican. It consisted of a film imaginatively assembled from archive footage, projected on a screen above the platform, while contralto Hilary Summers sang eight songs based on poems of the time, accompanied by the Michael Nyman Band.

It was bold of Nyman to approach the subject of the war from this unusual angle. A cynic might say that by focusing on the mechanical aspect of war – the ghastly new machine-guns, the sinister and unbelievably vast airships, the mechanical movements of the women in armaments factories – Nyman was simply adapting the topic to his own limitations as a composer. This is, after all, the man who became famous in the Eighties as the British apostle of American minimalism. On his soundtracks to films such as Peter Greenaway’s The Draughtsman’s

Contract, the courtly phrases of Purcell or Mozart were chopped into fragments and obsessively repeated.

In many ways this new piece marked a return to Nyman’s roots. It was played by his own raucously loud band, in which the strings, as always, had to struggle mightily to be heard against the saxophones and brass. Hilary Summers had to struggle, too. The music often lay at a cruelly high altitude for her contralto voice, and not many of her words could be heard against the relentlessly amplified din. And the music borrowed heavily from the past. Every song was based on a recomposition of a well-known piece of classical music, including Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle and Franck’s violin sonata.

However, the spirit was entirely different. The insistent loudness was there, but the jaunty, heartless mechanised quality had gone. Nyman wanted to wring the pathos from his sources, and wind it up a notch by placing Summers’s voice against the original at a strange, uncomfortable angle. The loudness and strain in the sound became expressive, and brought out the agonised quality in many of the images, especially those which showed mutilated soldiers being fitted with primitive prosthetics, or trembling uncontrollably with shell-shock.

Most of the pieces written to mark the centenary of the war have set out to wring our hearts, rather than make us think. Nyman’s does both, magnificently.

War Work is available on CD, released on MN records