Choral music is always a prominent element of the Proms. Each season traditionally begins with a major choral work – John Adams’ Harmonium this year – before ranging across the historical spectrum from the Renaissance to the 20th century in the subsequent two months of concerts. Substantial new choral works are less regular, but this year new and nearly new choral pieces by British composers have featured more prominently in the first half of the season, with substantial works by Judith Weir and Mark-Anthony Turnage following earlier major pieces by James MacMillan and Mark Simpson all receiving premieres of one kind or another.
Weir’s piece, In the Land of Uz, was a world premiere, commissioned for the first of this year’s Proms at … concerts, a Saturday-afternoon series at different venues across London. This one took place in Southwark Cathedral, with the BBC Singers, the Nash Ensemble and organist Stephen Farr, conducted by David Hill. The composer describes it as a “dramatised reading” of the Old Testament Book of Job, using the biblical text for a 35-minute cantata that trims the story of Job’s trials down to the essentials. There are brief passages of speech, but the bulk of the narrative is given to the chorus, while a solo tenor (the excellent Adrian Thompson) portrays the prophet.
But it’s the simplicity and spareness of Weir’s score that give it such resonance. Just six instruments including an organ accompany the singers, all used with incredible restraint. The viola becomes Job’s other self, accompanying his laments and leading him through the final, touching acceptance of his old age; a trumpet joins with the organ to depict a whirlwind, and the appearance of a tuba is reserved for the voice of God in the penultimate section. And there’s a saxophone too, used to depict the hypocrisy of Job’s comforters, and echoing perhaps Vaughan Williams’ use of the same instrument in his Masque for Dancing based on the same story, though Vaughan Williams used an alto sax, where Weir opts for the soprano.
Understated and unforced, the musical details fuse into the storytelling in a way that seems perfectly natural, never contrived. Weir’s score is on a different scale entirely from Turnage’s Hibiki, which made up the second half of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s concert under Kazushi Ono two nights later, at the Albert Hall. This was the European premiere of a 50-minute piece first heard in Japan last autumn, commissioned to mark the 30th anniversary of Suntory Hall in Tokyo. But Hibiki is more a work of commemoration than celebration, for it was composed in the aftermath of the Fukushima tragedy in 2011, when approximately 19,000 people were killed by the tsunami that followed an offshore earthquake.
Throughout his career, some of Turnage’s most impressive achievements have been works composed as memorials, from the cello-and-ensemble piece Kai and the instrumental suite Blood on the Floor, to his recent percussion concerto Martland Memorial, and the quasi-symphonic Remembering, which Simon Rattle and the LSO introduced at the beginning of this year. But those pieces were very much personal responses to the loss of friends and colleagues; Hibiki was intended as a more public expression of commemoration and consolation, addressed to a nation that was still coming to terms with the scale of its tragedy.
By and large, it does that successfully in music that calls for soprano and mezzo soloists (Sally Matthews and Mihoko Fujimura), a children’s choir (the combined Finchley Children’s Music Group and New London Chamber Choir), as well as a large orchestra. The sequence of movements, seven altogether, three of them purely orchestral, isn’t entirely convincing; the opening pair of orchestral movements, named after the Japanese prefectures that were hit by the tsunami, are followed by a setting for the two soloists of an English translation of a Japanese poem about a child escaping from the firebombing of Tokyo in 1945, and by a version of a Japanese translation of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star, for the children’s choir and the solo soprano. There’s another pair of vocal movements to end the work – another Japanese poem in English sung by the mezzo, and a final, fading repetition of the word “Fukushima”, for all the singers. But before those there’s another orchestral movement, Suntory Dance, which seems to belong to a different work altogether, and seems rather like an attempt to inject something upbeat and extrovert into a work that is otherwise consistently reflective and elegiac.
If as a whole Hibiki doesn’t quite transcend the context of the original commission – it’s hard to imagine it being performed in 10 years’ time anywhere except Japan – the score does confirm how much sparer and more controlled Turnage’s recent music has become, while, as this performance under Ono reinforced, his orchestral writing, and its colouristic imagination remain as vivid as ever.
•Available on BBC iPlayer until 11 September (Weir), 13 September (Turnage). The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
