The Great Journey, Three Choirs Festival, review: a riveting odyssey into the heart of darkness
When last year’s Three Choirs Festival was cancelled, it was only the third interruption in its stately 300-year rotation around the three cathedral cities of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester. The big-scale chorus-and-orchestra events in this year’s festival in Worcester were thrown into doubt when lockdown was extended to July 19, but fortunately they’ve survived unscathed, with a few last-minute changes. Sunday night’s concert in Worcester Cathedral was small in scale, with just one voice and a handful of instrumentalists from the Goldfield Ensemble. But after all the anxiety it seemed especially poignant, the golden evening light slanting through the windows especially beautiful.
The first two pieces fitted the occasion perfectly, as the sounds from the small group of string players, winds and harp had a similar golden glow. First came two songs by Ethel Smyth, the redoubtable composer who ruffled feathers in the male-dominated world of late-19th-century music and once wrote a Suffragette hymn. That leads you to expect something assertive, but her two songs from 1908 were as softly intimate as you could imagine. Baritone Marcus Farnsworth, standing in at short notice for a quarantined Roderick Williams, shaped the very Frenchified perfumed melodies with winning grace, and the ensemble conducted by Adrian Partington caught the fluttering nostalgia of the first and the “oriental” flute-and-harp languor of the second beautifully.
The sounds of In the Mendips, a 15-minute set of miniatures inspired by Richard Long’s visions of the craggy limestone hills south of Bristol, were beautiful in a different way – sharp-edged and innocent, with not a trace of French perfume. Its composer Gabriel Jackson, who is the featured composer at this year’s festival, has become a big name in religious music circles for his radiantly beautiful, very static music. This nearly 40-year-old piece shows the young Jackson venturing down a modernist path he eventually abandoned, building music out of little bright fragments constantly shuffled and re-combined (with a sly quotation from Stravinsky thrown in). It was a delight, and I couldn’t help wishing Jackson had ventured a little further down that path.
After these straightforward pleasures came something that could have been a penance: a 50-minute sung recitation of excerpts from the memoirs of a Spanish nobleman who travelled to South America with the conquistadors, became separated from them in a storm, and lived among (as he put it) “poor naked savages” for years. In fact this “Great Journey” was riveting. It was accompanied by a brilliantly conceived score by Colin Matthews, who has Benjamin Britten’s gift for conjuring hugely varied sound worlds from a handful of players. It was hard to believe the same group of musicians who’d just charmed our ears were making these extraordinarily sinister sounds, sometimes suggestive of panic during an attack, sometimes evoking tropical heat prolonged over weeks or years.
Into this dank, heart-of-darkness world Matthews would often insert a distorted memory of Spanish Renaissance music, an evocation of “enlightened” Christianity that seemed more and more ironic as the nobleman’s disillusionment at the cruelty of the conquistadors increased. Farnsworth sang the hugely taxing solo part with sensitive fortitude and wonderfully clear diction, so one never lost the thread of the story. Matthews’s piece may be more than 30 years old, but in an era that’s newly sensitised to the horrors of colonialism it has never seemed more urgently relevant.
Festival runs until Aug 1. Tickets: 3choirs.aug
