The BBC Symphony Orchestra had marked the Armistice centenary on the weekend itself with one of its Total Immersion events, built around a concert staging of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s The Silver Tassie. Three weeks on, its latest Barbican concert, conducted by Martyn Brabbins, continued the remembrance theme, with the first performance of Cheryl Frances-Hoad’s Last Man Standing, commissioned by the BBC.
Frances-Hoad describes her half-hour-long piece as a “monodrama for baritone and orchestra”. The libretto is a specially written sequence of 14 poems by Tamsin Collison, tracing a young man’s experience of serving in the first world war trenches. It’s a familiar enough narrative now, which Frances-Hoad renders as a continuous sequence with a couple of extended orchestral interludes separating some of the texts.
Her monodrama was semi-staged – poppies strewn across the platform and a soldier’s uniform for the protagonist (Marcus Farnsworth, excellent as ever) – but Last Man Standing never convinces either as music theatre or a song cycle. The chameleon-like nature of Frances-Hoad’s music can be one of its most appealing qualities, but here that seems too arbitrary, and becomes just an easy, almost hackneyed way of triggering stock responses to the horrors of warfare. The opening and closing numbers are pastiches of Butterworth’s Housman settings, while elsewhere the reliance on soldiers’ songs – When This Lousy War Is Over; We’re Here Because We’re Here – seems too obviously borrowed from Joan Littlewood’s Oh! What a Lovely War. There are a couple of striking orchestral passages, as well as an interlude based upon Auld Lang Syne (which goes on just a bit too long), but they don’t really add up to enough.
If the premiere was disappointing, the works around it were anything but; Arnold Bax’s November Woods and Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fourth Symphony received outstandingly memorable performances from Brabbins and the BBCSO. Both are scores coloured by the nearness of war, though in the case of Bax’s darkly intense tone poem, composed between 1914-17 and one of his greatest achievements, its anguish seems to have been triggered by the turmoil in his private life rather than the horrors of the conflict then raging across the Channel. Brabbins dug deep into its sculpted string lines and teased out its flurries of Debussyan transparency, just as he made the fury of the Vaughan Williams symphony unmistakable, and stunningly vivid in its characterisation.
• Available on BBC Sounds.
