Ritual can be a choir in procession in a great cathedral or the simple act of putting down a violin bow. At the BBC Proms’ Bristol performances this weekend, it was both – and to strikingly different effect.
First, grandeur and spectacle, as Nigel Short and his chamber choir Tenebrae celebrated their 25th anniversary with a return to their 2005 commission: Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles. Inspired by the Catholic pilgrimage to Santiago, it’s a piece with a cult following, a phenomenon as much as a score, and one that only comes to life fully in live performance.
We start in musical darkness. A low drone gradually swells and rises, growls becoming notes. Then, suddenly, a chord flares bright from behind us. Singers surround the audience, clustering in circles, moving down the aisles, forming and reforming into quartets, duets. Talbot’s hypnotic music – post-minimalist patterns and dances, chants and road songs – is designed to inhabit space, physically as well as musically dramatising the journey along the Camino.
It’s hard to imagine it better sung. High sopranos and low basses performed unearthly feats of endurance, and the precision of the whole – a musical mosaic constructed before our eyes – was utterly compelling. But it’s a piece conceived (as Short explained) with “wonderful cathedrals” in mind – cathedrals without the creaking wooden floors and overpowering heat of St George’s Bristol, where the scuffling and banging business of movement (and a faint from an audience member, derailing much of the choreography) overpowered the rite. It’s hard to keep your eyes on heaven when your ears keep getting dragged back to the here and now.
No such problems down the road at Bristol Beacon, where the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s chief conductor Sakari Oramo swapped baton for bow, joined by soprano Anu Komsi for a ritual they’ve performed for nearly 40 years – since before they were married.
Scored for just violin and voice, György Kurtág’s 1986 Kafka Fragments mines the novelist’s diaries and letters not just for gold but lead and copper too – 40 shards of text that range from the tender and philosophical to the banal, erotic and absurd. In the composer’s 100th birthday year, it’s the perfect distillation of the Hungarian’s music: playful and infinitely rich, hearing the world in a grain of sand.
Are the Fragments an argument? A love story? A camouflaged opera? In Komsi and Oramo’s hands – calm, matter of fact, intensely focused – they feel, above all, like a search for truth: tantalisingly beyond reach in slippery, striving near-octaves, rejected in the simplicity of “The good march in step”, the lyricism of “The flower hung dreamily” and the bravura excesses of “Scene on a tram”. They try each musical door with equanimity, never demanding or forcing interpretation. Why rush to the answer when there are 40 more years of questions ahead?
• Available on BBC Sounds until 12 October. The Proms continue until 12 September
