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John Foulds: A World Requiem
Sunday 11 November 2007
Royal Albert Hall,London
“The thrilling baritone of Gerald Finley… deserve special mention.” The Telegraph
“…Gerald Finley… was particularly outstanding in his fervour and commitment.” The Guardian
Leon Botstein conductor
Jeanne-Michelle Charbonnet, soprano
Catherine Wynn-Rogers, mezzo-soprano
Stuart Skelton, tenor
Gerald Finley, baritone
BBC Symphony Chorus
Crouch End Festival Chorus
Philharmonia Chorus
Trinity Boys Choir
BBC Symphony Orchestra
'They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old ...' For four consecutive years in the mid-1920s Armistice Day was marked by annual performances in the Royal Albert Hall, under the patronage of the (now Royal) British Legion, of the World Requiem by John Foulds. Not heard since 1926, Foulds's heartfelt memorial to the war dead of all nations is here revived under American conductor Leon Botsteim in a spectacular re-creation of those original Festival of Remembrance performances, complete with international soloists, massed choirs, large orchestra, off-stage fanfares and the great organ of the Royal Albert Hall. Join us for what will be an unforgettable evening.
In association with The Royal British Legion.
Supported by The Daily Telegraph
CLICK HERE FOR THE TEXT OF A WORLD REQUIEM
This performance was broadcast live (11 November) on BBC Radio 3
It will also be appearing as a 2 disc SA-CD on general release from 2 January 2008 (Chandos). Chandos will also be making some audio samples available in the next few weeks.
http://www.chandos.net/newsextra.asp
What the critics say
Ivan Hewett, The Telegraph, 12 November 2007
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/11/12/ndead412.xml
World Requiem comes alive after 81-year wait
The anticipation in the Royal Albert Hall was palpable - we were about to hear a vast choral World Requiem for the dead of the First World War that had lain unperformed
Anticipation was tinged with sheer curiosity. We knew the composer, John Foulds, was a mysterious figure who dabbled in oriental religion and Indian music.
We'd heard wonders of the sheer scale of the piece, with its 20 movements spread over one hour 45 minutes, its vast orchestra and chorus, four soloists, and the off-stage choirs dispersed to all points of the compass.
The worry was that the music would try to impress by sheer force of numbers. That fear was unfounded.
The orchestral sound was more often delicate than spectacular. When it did rise to a massive crescendo, the sound was radiant rather than ponderous, with a glow of horn and a sheen of glockenspiel and harp.
The musical style seemed to call on every idiom available in the early 20th century.
There were moments of dusky English pastoralism like something out of Warlock, there were chordal patterns rocking back and forth in a sweetly reverential mood not far from Fauré, and later we heard echoes of Delius and Skryabin.
Yet the piece had a very definite atmosphere of its own. It was as if Foulds had gathered all his sources, and by adding little glimpses of modernism and a touch of Indian mystery, projected them up on to a mystical plain.
In the loveliest movement, "Elysium", we heard a kind of spiritualised and "orientalised" late Wagner, as if the Flower Maidens in Parsifal had been spirited off to a Hindu ashram.
What we heard was a work of amazing talent, even a kind of genius - which isn't to say it's an unspotted masterpiece. Foulds was too much in love with his ideas, and lingers too long over the weaker ones.
But it was a wonderful occasion, made more so by the evident care and dedication of the many performers who helped bring it about.
The thrilling baritone of Gerald Finley, the excellent Trinity Boys Choir, and the conductor Leon Botstein, who held this army together with a sure hand, deserve special mention.
Tim Ashley, The Guardian,
November 13, 2007
http://music.guardian.co.uk/classical/livereviews/story/0,,2210079,00.html
Rating: Four stars out of five
John Foulds' A World Requiem was given its premiere at the first British Legion Festival of Remembrance in 1923, and was subsequently performed annually until 1926, after which it was mysteriously dropped. Conducted by Leon Botstein, this was its first performance for 81 years, allowing us insight into both its strengths and weaknesses, and into the possible reasons for its neglect.
A pacifist, theosophist and deeply committed socialist, Foulds was very much an anti-establishment figure. The text interweaves passages from the Bible with Hindu poetry and demands that we transcend patriotic and religious ideology by honouring the dead on all sides of military conflict - sentiments that strike deep chords now, as they doubtless did in 1923, though not, one suspects, in the intervening years.
The score is emotive and eclectic. Conceived spatially and written for vast forces, it takes Berlioz's Requiem as its principal model, though it also nods in the direction of the requiems of Brahms and Fauré. The use of quarter tones in some of the string writing hints at eastern music of which Foulds was fond. Chant-like choral passages interspersed with monodic baritone recitatives suggest that Russian orthodox church music may also have been on his mind.
The burning sincerity of the performance eclipsed any qualms about stylistic disunity. Botstein conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra with eloquent gravitas and the choral singing, from the combined forces of the Philharmonia, BBC Symphony and Crouch End Festival choruses, was superb in its mixture of hushed grief and exaltation. Among the soloists, baritone Gerald Finley - the priest-like celebrant of the whole vast ritual - was particularly outstanding in his fervour and commitment.
Barry Millington, Evening Standard 12.11.07
Longing for something memorable
If ever a work was destined for the Royal Albert Hall it is surely John Foulds's World Requiem. This remarkable "Cenotaph in Sound", as the composer's subtitle has it, was premiered there at the first ever Festival of Remembrance in 1923 and repeated in three subsequent years to capacity audiences. Since then it has not been heard until yesterday's performance by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Leon Botstein.
In 20 movements, the Requiem is a setting of biblical texts and paraphrases; while pacifist in inspiration, it is grandiose in ambition. A large orchestra on stage was augmented by groupings in different parts of the house. In one section the onstage orchestra stopped completely, while the ethereal sounds of string quartet, celesta and harps wafted down from a gallery. At other times, brass instruments placed strategically around the hall added their sonorous contribution.
For all the extravagance of scale, though, the musical inspiration is spread disappointingly thin. Conservatively tonal in idiom, there is little here that would have surprised, say, Holst; one longed for something truly momentous or memorable to happen.
A fine team of soloists including Gerald Finley and Catherine Wyn-Rogers injected what passion they could and no fewer than four excellent choruses (BBC Symphony, Crouch End Festival, Philharmonia and Trinity Boys' Choir) projected the message of peace confidently into the auditorium. All credit to the BBC for putting on a work that demanded to be heard. Let's not make it an annual event, however.
Geoff Brown, The Times, 13 November 2007
Rating: Three out of five stars:
Scorned by most critics but greeted with gratitude by grieving Armistice Day audiences in the 1920s, John Foulds’s A World Requiem has spent nearly all its unusual life sleeping on a shelf. Even when arcane Foulds works have been revived, exploring conductors have tiptoed around this adventurous British composer’s one big hit.
Until now. You have to hand it to the BBC for mustering the curiosity and resources to awaken this enigmatic score and give it another chance in the venue in which it was born. Grandiose sound fused with a grandiose space: as fanfares and youthful voices rang from the galleries’ four points, and the brass-fat orchestra, massed choirs and organ raised the roof, it was easy to be thrilled. But could Foulds’s music, and the text’s compilation of Christian and Hindu words, carry us with hearts engaged through 100 minutes?
Yes and no. Jeanne-Michèle Charbonnet’s wobbly soprano aside, the forces commanded by the daredevil conductor Leon Botstein served up many beauties, generally composed in a style mixing plainsong with the modal gestures that we’ve come to associate with Vaughan Williams. Gerald Finley and Stuart Skelton, baritone and tenor, were exceptionally eloquent; and the BBC Symphony Orchestra feasted on Foulds’s cultivated orchestrations, with no effect overplayed, from shimmering percussion and quarter-tone strings to bulbous brass.
True, Foulds does some thumb-twiddling, making music without bones. But the libretto twiddles far more. Too long; too many words, the bulk of them generalities that force the 21st-century listener to stand at a respectful distance. We needed the equivalent of Wilfred Owen’s poems in Britten’s War Requiem to plunge us into individual stories and tragedies. Nothing of that here; no sense of the trenches’ blood and mud. By design, Foulds was taking a loftier, more monumental view of the pity of war, in line with the work’s original tagline, “a Cenotaph in Sound”.
A jumble, then: of its time and out of time; conventional and modernist; often thrilling, occasionally blank. And a justified revival. If you missed the performance or the Radio 3 broadcast, Chandos will be issuing it on disc in January.
Michael Church , the Independent, 13 November 2007
http://arts.independent.co.uk/music/reviews/article3155398.ece
Rating: Three out of five stars
Not many pre-concert lectures draw as large a crowd as the one for John Foulds's A World Requiem, but few have such an interesting story. After stumbling on this gigantic work by accident, Calum MacDonald has spent 30 years championing it: this would be its first performance since 1926. It draws on the words of John Bunyan, the prophet Isaiah, the Psalms, and the medieval poet Kabir, and is pervaded by the ideas of Theosophy, the mystical quasi-religion to which Foulds and his circle adhered.
Its premiere at the Albert Hall was a popular but not critical success; it had three more performances – one relegated to a smaller venue – before the British Legion withdrew its patronage, and the conductor Adrian Boult, music director of the BBC, declined to rescue it. So why was it "mysteriously axed", as the programme melodramatically claimed? Was it not such a hit the second time round?
With Leon Botstein conducting the BBC Symphony Chorus, three other choirs and a substantial orchestra, we could judge for ourselves; the 90-minute, 20-movement work would be performed without an interval, and would be broadcast live on Radio 3.
Three minutes in, my defences were down as Gerald Finley intoned an ecstatic response over a muted chorus: no other baritone can touch him for declamatory expressiveness. The next few movements followed each other seamlessly, with each bringing delights: eerily chromatic slides, a small chorus accompanied by a brass quartet, a boys' choir suddenly sounding from the heavens with microtonal harmonies.
When Finley addressed all the nations of the world, he was answered by fanfares from the gallery at all points of the compass. The first half closed, as it had opened, with a beautifully shaped "Requiem".
But as the second half of this work unfolded, one realised its limitations. It was all about voices and effects, and its ecstatic tone became increasingly monotonous: apart from an iffy French soprano, this was as good a performance as it could conceivably get, yet by the end one was mildly bored. "Axed" – or just expired?