Modern musical masterpieces: Walton, Poulenc & Shostakovich
By Robert Gay
Walton’s Belshazzar’s Feast is one of the undisputed masterpieces of the choral repertoire. This short, concentrated oratorio – scored for baritone solo, double mixed chorus and orchestra – was composed to a text by Osbert Sitwell, and premiered at the prestigious Leeds Festival in 1931.
It is a setting of the biblical story of ‘the writing on the wall’, from the Book of Daniel. Apparently, it was precisely this arresting moment which brought on an acute bout of composer’s block. Eventually, Walton overcame this, producing a minor masterpiece. The orchestration is extravagant, and includes three percussionists playing a vast array of exotic percussion, including whip and anvil.
On Limelight Arts Travel’s Paris to Barcelona tour next May, we hear this exuberant work performed in the new concert hall of the architecturally extraordinary Philharmonie de Paris, designed by Jean Nouvel (2015), and situated, controversially, on the outskirts of the city. The outstanding Orchestre de Paris is conducted by its new music director, the charismatic twenty-six-year-old Finn, Klaus Mäkelä, with renowned bass-baritone Sir Willard White as the narrator.
The Walton oratorio will be preceded by Shostakovich’s Second Cello Concerto which was written for Mstislav Rostropovich, who premiered the work in Moscow in 1966 at Shostakovich’s sixtieth birthday concert. This fine, introspective concerto uses an Odessa street song as the theme of its short second movement, which is then linked to the finale by grotesque horn fanfares and a cello cadenza accompanied by tambourine. The concerto will be played on this occasion by the superb Argentinian cellist Sol Gabetta.
Opera goers with long memories may recall a fine production by The Australian Opera (as it was then called) of Poulenc’s operatic masterpiece Dialogues des Carmélites, which starred the young Isobel Buchanan as Blanche and Joan Sutherland reprising her role as Madame Lidoine (from the first Covent Garden performances). Lone Koppel, singing the Old Prioress, made an unforgettable impression in her harrowing death scene, as directed by Elijah Moshinsky. On the Paris to Barcelona tour, we have the opportunity to see this rarely-performed work at the magnificent Grand-Théâtre de Bordeaux in a new production by Mireille Delunsch, who also sings the role of the Old Prioress.
The opera, with a libretto by the composer, premiered at La Scala in January 1957, followed a few months later by the Paris premiere with Poulenc’s preferred cast of Denise Duval as Blanche, Régine Crespin as Madame Lidoine, and Rita Gorr as Mother Marie.
The work is set in Compiègne and Paris at the time of ‘The Terror’ during the French Revolution. It tells the story of the aristocratic Blanche de la Force, who initially joins the Carmelite Order to escape the stresses and strains of her life, and who subsequently suffers a crisis of faith as religious orders in France begin to be targeted by the brutal new regime.
For a work composed in the mid-1950s, the musical idiom is surprisingly approachable. Indeed, the composer apologised for the fact that his nuns sing only tonal music, thereby referencing music of their own time, rather than the composer’s. As you might expect, the work includes beautiful settings of three celebrated liturgical texts – the Ave Maria, Ave verum corpus, and the Salve Regina which the nuns sing as they make their way to the scaffold in the final scene.
The superbly crafted score owes a musical debt to Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande for its fluid conversational style, Musorgsky’s Boris Godunov for its sense of menace and nightmare, and Verdi’s original French Don Carlos for its epic sweep.
These three works – oratorio, concerto and opera – are all fine examples of the efforts made by mid-twentieth century composers, from different nationalist schools, to engage audiences in new musical experiences which both enthral and enrich.
Image credits
The Grande Salle Pierre Boulez at the Philharmonie de Paris by Vince Traveller (Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0)
Klaus Mäkelä by Marco Borggreve for the Oslo Philharmonic (courtesy HarrisonParrott)
Cellist Sol Gabetta by Julia Wesely (courtesy HarrisonParrott)
ROBERT GAY
Robert Gay is one of Australia’s most highly-regarded music tour leaders and educators. He has given popular courses in music history at the Centre for Continuing Education, University of Sydney, for more than thirty years and has designed and led over 100 cultural tours.