Miraculous performances capture the beauty of Britten’s holy songs
Britten Canticles Snape Maltings, Suffolk
In the annals of vocal music, Britten’s five Canticles stand alone. Too large-scale and dramatic to be called “songs”, too small to be “cantatas” or “chamber operas”, deeply spiritual yet not exactly Christian, they have no real predecessors or successors. They aren’t often performed, and to hear all five together is truly rare.
That’s one reason that Sunday’s concert was worth the trek to Snape Maltings in Suffolk, where a complete performance formed part of the excellent Summer at Snape season. Another was the prospect of hearing the wonderful tenor Allan Clayton in all five, performed in a shrewdly judged nonchronological order. He was accompanied mostly by pianist James Baillieu, with a supporting cast of two instrumentalists and two singers in the larger-scale pieces.
The concert began with a brilliant stroke. From somewhere offstage, we heard the voice of Clayton and countertenor Feargal Mostynwilliams, jointly impersonating the voice of God at the beginning of Canticle II (Abraham and Isaac). This tells the story of the patriarch so obedient to God’s command that he is willing to sacrifice his son. It’s a cruel story, but that double voice had to be radiant and gentle (because God will eventually be merciful) – which it was. Then both singers stepped on stage and into their human roles. The progression through Abraham’s anguish and Isaac’s puzzlement, fear and resignation was beautifully caught.
That performance set a high bar, which all the following canticles met with ease. The first and simplest of the works (My Beloved is Mine and I Am His, 1947) is a rapturous hymn of praise inspired by the Song of Songs, which Britten composed for his lifelong partner, Peter Pears. Again, Clayton’s ringing tenor went straight to the work’s emotional heart, and again Baillieu pulled off the miracle of seeming unbuttoned and spontaneous while tactfully allowing that voice to take centre stage.
The most mysterious of the canticles is the final one, from 1971, based on TS Eliot’s early poem, The Death of Saint Narcissus. The alternately sharp and muffled sound of Olivia Jageurs’s harp and Clayton’s voice, now with a new, almost hooded quality, caught the self-destructive nature of Narcissus’s self-loving passion. At the opposite pole of anguish was Canticle III (Still Falls the Rain), based on Edith Sitwell’s wartime poem of that title, which laments the “1,940 nails upon the Cross”. The addition of Ben Goldscheider’s pungent, dark horn added bite to this work’s desolate colour.
Finally came the largest piece, Canticle IV, based on another Eliot poem, The Journey of the Magi. The weary narration, which complains of recalcitrant camel-drivers and terrible weather, and the reluctant admission of the miracle witnessed in the manger, was voiced by Clayton, Mostyn-williams and baritone Roderick Williams with just the right cynicism, touched with awe and foreboding. By the end, it felt as though we had witnessed a procession of friezes, each portraying a scene in its own particular, haunting colour. That owed much to Britten’s astonishing compositional skill, but no less to the wonderful performers.