Gloucester is the host city for this year’s Three Choirs festival. As usual, the cathedral is the hub of everything, but there are concerts around the county, too, and the premiere of the first festival commission of the week, Philip Lancaster’s War Passion, took place 20 miles away in Cirencester, at a concert given by the St Cecilia Singers and the Bristol Ensemble, conducted by Jonathan Hope.
As well as being a composer, Lancaster is well known for his research on early 20th-century British music and poetry, especially the work of the Gloucester-born Ivor Gurney. It was while he was studying Isaac Rosenberg’s poem The Tower of Skulls that he conceived the idea for a choral piece in which poems from the first world war became a commentary on a retelling of the New Testament passion story.
That, essentially, is what his War Passion now is: a 70-minute interleaving of the events of Christ’s passion, from Gethsemane to Golgotha, with settings of poems that draw parallels with the horrifying experiences of the trenches. There are texts by Julian Grenfell, Edward Thomas, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and, inevitably, Gurney, together with the Rosenberg poem that triggered it all for Lancaster. There are four soloists – a mezzo (Juliet Curnow in this premiere) who is the narrator of the passion story, a soprano (Anna Gillingham) who comments through the poems, and a tenor and baritone (Peter Harris and James Geidt) who take roles in the passion as well also offering commentary on it.
Any work “about” the first world war that combines poetry with religious texts in this kind of way inevitably invites awkward comparisons with Britten’s War Requiem. Lancaster even sets one of the Wilfred Owen poems, Futility, that Britten uses. But War Passion is not a public statement in the way that War Requiem so self-consciously sets out to be; it’s far more intimate, and avoids grand gestures. More obvious signposting in the music would sometimes have been welcome, for even though Lancaster suggests the four movements of his passion have a symphonic shape (and one in which the chorus plays a relatively small part), the dramatic structure never quite comes into sharp focus.
There are some good things about the way in which texts are dovetailed, while the best of the music – always tonal, but sometimes churningly chromatic – is powerfully suggestive. But in the church acoustic there were constant balance problems between the solo voices and relatively modest ensemble; words disappeared when solo voices were accompanied by more than a single instrument, and in both Lancaster’s work as in Herbert Howells’ unaccompanied Requiem – which Hope conducted before it – too many choral textures dissolved into mush.
• The Three Choirs festival is at various venues in Gloucestershire until 30 July. Box office: 01452 768928.
- This article was corrected on 26 July 2016. The Wilfred Owen poem referred to is called Futility, not Move Him Into the Sun; the latter is the first line of the poem.
