Michael Nyman’s song cycle, completed last year, is subtitled Eight Songs with Film, though unfortunately the documentary footage that is intended to accompany a performance, taken from French, German and US archives of the first world war, is not included on the CD. Though that seems an opportunity missed, on their own terms the songs – and the instrumental movements that punctuate them – make a convincing enough sequence.
Taking his cue from a poem by Gaston de Ruyter, Chansons Vieilles sur d’Autres Airs (Old Songs to Other Melodies), Nyman has assembled a collection of texts by English, French, German and Hungarian poets, all but one of whom (the English painter David Bomberg) died during the first world war, and juxtaposed them with musical ideas taken from a whole range of composers, from Orlando Gibbons and John Bull to Chopin and César Franck. Though the slow movement of Schubert’s final piano sonata does haunt two of the songs rather persistently, many of the other quotations are much less intrusive, and combined with the restraint of Nyman’s instrumental writing, for a typical band of strings, saxophones, brass and piano, the whole work has a quiet seriousness that is very effective.
It’s a musical world that seems far removed from the propulsive, hard-edged sound of the scores with which Nyman established his reputation. There’s almost a feeling of born-again English pastoralism about some of the writing, though there’s always a sense that, without the images they are meant to accompany, we might be missing something vital in the purely instrumental movements. Contralto Hilary Summers is the soloist, her dark, plummy tones meshing perfectly with Nyman’s brassy-tinged textures. Certainly, War Work feels like an elegy to a lost generation, one channelled through three centuries of musical history; it’s an eloquent and sometimes strikingly beautiful piece.
