This Requiem had an abundance of charm, but lacked maturity
Proms 2021
Britten Sinfonia/ National Youth Choir Royal Albert Hall, London SW7
★★★★★
Grab the audience by the scruff is the first rule of showbiz, and the Proms certainly obeyed it on Friday night. The first sounds we heard were a howling gale and the crash of thunder, summoned by the percussionists of the Britten Sinfonia on thunder-sheets and wind machines. Was a musical storm in the offing? No, it was just to give a bit of extra drama to a couple of rustic dances lifted from the 1739 tragedy Dardanus by Jeanphilippe Rameau.
This was the first in a sequence of pieces by the great French Baroque composer performed by the Britten Sinfonia under David Bates. Heightening the drama of music is always Bates’s aim and he uses an extraordinary range of bodily gestures, at one point standing arms pinned to one side and shaking his whole body, to give an effect of energy constrained before being released.
In the first part where the music was all on the small scale of “character” pieces, Bates’s approach worked well. Rameau’s dances had a thrilling rhythmic bite and tangy orchestral colour, and the performance of the Second Symphony by Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-georges, one of the first black composers (his mother was a slave in the French colony of Guadeloupe) also leapt into vivid life.
It was fascinating to hear Bologne’s piece side by side with Rameau’s music: one could catch lingering echoes of the Baroque courtliness in the new forward-moving dramatic Mozartian style of his own age.
Alongside the dances were two tragic arias from Rameau’s operas, sung with affecting but somewhat small-voiced tenderness by soprano Samantha Clarke and tenor Nick Pritchard. One’s ear was drawn more to the lovely bassoon accompanying parts, eloquently played by Sarah Burnett and Shelly Organ.
After the interval the magic and make-believe of Rameau was set aside for something on a different level of seriousness: Mozart’s Requiem. The orchestra was joined for this by the National Youth Choir, and two more soloists, the contralto Claudia Huckle and bass William Thomas, who was much the most characterful of the soloists. His opening flourish in the Tuba Mirum was the performance’s highlight.
It’s true the Requiem has its moments of drama as in the Dies Irae, and Bates made these maximally vivid, with sudden surges and retreats in dynamics. The problem was that he applied this small-scale approach across the whole piece, with the result that the music lost much of its breadth.
The magnificent rising melody of the Lachrimosa should feel like a continuity, despite the breaks in the line. Here it felt like a series of small explosions. The choir sang their hearts out, but I couldn’t help feeling the piece was inappropriate for their light bright sound. Youthful lightness has its charm, but sometimes the gravity of adult voices is indispensable.