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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
Complexity, Simplicity February 1, 2002
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By Kerry McCarthy
The singers of Chanticleer presented the world premiere of an unusual and
challenging work last week at Stanford Memorial Church. Sir John
Tavener's Lamentations and Praises is a liturgical drama adapted from
the Good Friday service of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Its double
title is meant to evoke what Tavener calls "joy/sorrow": exultation in
mourning, hope in despair. The piece unfolds at a slow, almost
imperceptible pace, drawing on the simplest musical material. It asks
much from its audience but, at least in its better moments, rewards their
efforts with a glimpse of something beyond the sum of its parts.
Lamentations and Praises was a special commission for the twelve men of
Chanticleer. Tavener knew their extraordinary voices and wrote with them
in mind. The overall range of the piece covers nearly four octaves.
Relentless bass drones hover around low C, while soprano lines soar into
the upper reaches of the staff. The singers worked entirely from memory,
which was yet more astonishing given the static, non-melodic quality of
much of the score.
Despite Tavener's desire to express both joy and sorrow simultaneously,
the piece was most compelling at its saddest. The most effective sections
were the haunting "Thrinos" refrains. These were wordless laments (using
only the Greek word for "alas") in descending scales, handed down from the
highest soprano to the lowest bass, and alternating with pungent,
bittersweet, thickly-layered passages for full choir. Some other parts
were less successful, tending more toward the grandiose or mechanically
repetitious than the sublime.
Chanticleer was joined by a small group of instrumentalists from Boston's Handel and Haydn Society. Lamentations and Praises calls for strings, flute, trombone, and an eclectic ensemble of percussion, including Eastern gongs and a semantron. The latter is the wooden plank and mallet traditionally used in Greek Orthodox monasteries in lieu of bells. The players (who were seated in an inconspicuous place behind the "stage") reinforced the singers and punctuated the work with wordless interludes. The acoustic of Stanford Memorial Church helped a great deal here, blending and prolonging the rich palette of sound. Tavener says in the score of Lamentations and Praises that "the singing must be Orthodox Byzantine in style." The singers and their director Joseph Jennings worked hard to achieve this idiom, even consulting with an Eastern Orthodox cantor. Chanticleer's impeccable classical training, which has served them so well in almost every area of the Western repertoire, seems to be a liability here. Even with their efforts at authenticity, a number of them sounded uncomfortable with the microtonal pitch-bending, rough tone, and abrupt breaks in register so characteristic of Eastern singing. French director Yves Coudray staged the work in collaboration with Tavener. He strove to reflect the contemplative atmosphere and pace of the score with simple, repetitive movements meant to evoke liturgy more than theater. A skeptical viewer might wonder whether the piece would have had a stronger effect as an unstaged choral work. The constant, sometimes stiff motion could be distracting at times, for the audience and, seemingly, for the singers.
That said, some of the action did work well. Near the end, the group symbolically buried the icon of Christ, recalling the procession and "entombment" in the Orthodox Good Friday liturgy. The singers, like a group of pallbearers, carried the icon into the tomb to deeply tragic lyrics: Give me this stranger whom His mother saw dead and cried out "O my Son and God." I trust in Your Resurrection, even if my entrails are wounded and my heart stricken as I see You as a corpse. As the icon vanished into the tomb, there was a wrenching realization that someone of infinite worth had in fact died and was being laid in the grave. At other times, the staging veered perilously into Sunday-school Easter pageant territory, as when the resurrected Christ appeared in a center-stage tableau vivant under dazzling lights, dressed in what appeared to be a sea of white chiffon. Lamentations and Praises is a difficult work for a modern American audience to confront. The composer meant it to be just that. In a pre-concert interview, Tavener expressed the hope that listeners would be "reborn" through hearing it. Deep-set Western ideas of drama, musical development, and the passage of time must be reconsidered in the course of the 75-minute performance. The piece, at least in such a fine rendition as this, seems to be worth the challenge. Although one sometimes felt that this group of first-rate singers and instrumentalists deserved better, the overall effect was intriguing — even, at moments, transforming. (Kerry McCarthy, a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Stanford University, is a performer, conductor, and student of early sacred music.) ©2002 Kerry McCarthy, all rights reserved |