Berkeley, Sibelius: Valdine Anderson (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), avid Goode (organ), BBC National Chorus of Wales, BBC National Orchestra of Wales / Jac van Steen (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 22. 5.2008 (GPu)

Michael Berkeley, Organ Concerto

Sibelius, Symphony No. 7

Michael Berkeley, Or Shall We Die?


Michael Berkeley has his sixtieth birthday on May 29^th of this year. Given that he has, since 2003, been Composer-in-Association with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (an arrangement that is about to come to a close); that he is Visiting Professor of Composition at the Welsh College of Music and Drama; that he has a home in Wales; that his new opera, For You (with libretto by Ian McEwan) will be premiered by Music Theatre Wales on May 31^st – then Cardiff was a wholly appropriate place for a celebratory concert. Perhaps surprisingly, the programme did not include either of the pieces Berkeley has written specifically for the orchestra during his time as Composer-in-Association, Tristessa (2004) or Seascapes, which some will have heard being premiered at the Proms in 2005. Instead we were offered a revival of the 1983 oratorio Or Shall We Die? (also with a libretto by Ian McEwan) and the Organ Concerto of 1987, both heard in the distinguished company of Sibelius’ Seventh Symphony.

The Organ Concerto, with which the evening began is a fine piece, as previously evidenced by the recording on Chandos (CHAN 10167) with Thomas Trotter as soloist and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Richard Hickox. But this is a piece, with its use of space and movement, that really needs to be heard live. It is grounded (like a lot of Michael Berkeley’s music) in his boyhood experiences as a chorister in Westminster Cathedral. The work opened with the entrance of three trumpeters through the hall and up onto the stage, their sound multi-layered, as it were, each a semi-tone above the other, a haunting sound full of echoing resonances (and no doubt even more effective in a church or cathedral acoustic than in a concert hall). The recessional of the trumpeters at the end of the work gives it a kind of palindromic structure, the sense of a ritual performed and completed. In what follows – thematically derived from the music of those trumpeters – the interplay of organ and orchestra is by turns exquisite and powerful.

In many passages the organ was beautifully blended with other instruments, the use of a variety of stops coming close to the echoic, to the supplementing of woodwinds or brass in a fashion which almost ‘hid’ the sound of the organ. David Goode was a superb soloist, his playing marvellously well judged in terms of dynamics and phrasing, the elevated sound-source of the organ, above and to the right of the orchestra, lending another spatial dimension to the performance. In the course of the piece Berkeley produces many fascinating textures, combining the organ with different instrumental groupings, amongst them being striking passages for trumpet and organ, organ and percussion, organ and violins. Juxtaposing passages of turbulent dissonance with more lyrical, more diatonic writing (especially in some lovely passages for the violins), this a fine, cohesive work, brought vividly to life by the playing of David Goode and the alert, thoughtful conducting of Jac van Steen, meticulously attentive to detail but always thinking also of larger questions of shape.

In a pre-concert talk – given in an accomplished double-act with Ian McEwan – Berkeley spoke of the Sibelius Seventh as “a favourite piece”. So, given that Jac van Steen has  shown himself to be an accomplished Sibelian in the past, there was obvious logic in including the piece on this programme – though it might be thought that a work by a composer with a more obvious influence on the younger Berkeley (his father? Lutoslawski?) or, indeed, a third work by Berkeley himself, might have made even more sense. Still, one needs no excuse to justify a performance of this remarkable work, certainly one of the high points of the twentieth-century symphonic repertoire. What we got to hear was a good, if not quite great, reading of this remarkable one movement distillation of Sibelius the symphonist. The rising C major scale which prefaces the opening adagio section didn’t perhaps have quite the weight and solemnity that it ideally bears. This seventh was not, in some respects, the work that Cecil Gray in his 1931 volume Sibelius (written  therefore, within a few years of the work’s composition) described as a work “of a lofty grandeur and dignity, a truly Olympian serenity and repose”. While Gray’s interpretation needn’t, of course, hold any absolute value, any monopoly on Sibelian truth, it does perhaps hint at dimensions that were perhaps absent, or underplayed  in this performance. Jac van Steen’s reading was more intimate than Olympian, a reading which seemed to hint at the problems of the composer’s personality and family circumstances more than it evoked  “lofty grandeur and dignity”. It’s an interesting approach and it bore real dividends; but at times the tension seemed to slacken and the reading seemed to carry far more conviction in some parts of the work than others. The first entrance of the famous trombone theme, accompanied by turbulent chromatic strings worked particularly well. So, too, did the shimmering string writing at the work’s close. But elsewhere, the orchestral sound lacked the kind of weight and gravity that one hears in the very best accounts of the work. An interesting – and characteristically intelligent – reading, well worth hearing, but one which fell slightly short of being fully satisfying.

After the interval we heard a revival of Or Shall we Die?, the anti-nuclear weapons oratorio for which McEwan provided words and Berkeley music, first performed in 1983 and originally commissioned by the London Symphony Orchestra Chorus. In the pre-concert talk mentioned above, composer and librettist alike expressed both pleasure in, and reservations about, the work, hearing it again twenty-five years later. In response to an audience question the two agreed that they had been tempted by thoughts of possible revision, the work containing both technical limitations and sentiments they no longer felt entirely happy about, but had decided that the work should stand as it was, since “that was who we were then and that was what we wrote then”. Certainly more than a few aspects of the work feel rather dated; it was interesting that Berkeley spoke of this as an early work, in contrast to the Organ Concerto, which he saw as a later, more mature work. His phrasing and tone implied a much greater chronological difference than the four years which actually separate the two compositions, the Organ Concerto being completed in 1987. Yet the composer was surely right insofar as the Organ Concerto embodies the voice of a composer, certainly open to other models and influences, but able fully to integrate such things into a coherent and individual musical voice of his own, while Or Shall We Die? speaks of an eclecticism that has not yet coalesced into a recognisable individual idiom, does not yet constitute a coherent musical world-view, as it were.

Or Shall We Die? emerged as a work that has a certain power and humanity, but in which some things now seem rather banal and affected, and at worst rather facilely opportunistic. There were moments when one thought of Stravinsky, of early John Tavener, even of Carl Orff, but not very many (there were some) of Michael Berkeley per se. The quasi-traditional choral writing in the setting of the fifth stanza of Blake’s ‘The Tyger’ (McEwan’s libretto incorporates a good deal of quotation from Blake) was accomplished and powerful; some of Berkeley’s unaccompanied (or barely accompanied) writing for the Hiroshima mother discovering her badly-burned and dying daughter had an affecting beauty; there was some fine writing for the solo violin in section three of the work. But other things were less successful; some of the ‘larger’ orchestral passages seemed reliant on rather modish effects; at times one wondered how much we were mean to understand as parodic – when the Chorus sang of how “Two great nations marshal their allies / and prepare for war” we heard quasi-Handelian brass fanfares, hardly relevant to preparations for nuclear war. Or was it meant as a sophisticated parodic allusion?

Certainly parody worked well when the Chorus sang of how the nuclear weaponry used at Hiroshima was blessed by the church and did so in a parody of Victorian hymn writing. Jac van Steen conducted the work with absolute commitment and drew out much that was impressive in the score; he was well supported by both orchestra and chorus (who acquitted themselves particularly well). Roderick Williams gave a good, forceful performance as ‘Man’, singing with clarity and unaffected directness. Valdine Anderson – whose work I have often admired – I found slightly disappointing on this occasion, in the role of ‘Woman’; there were (at least from where I was sitting) serious problems of audibility, and her often heavy vibrato seemed more than once to be at odds with the ‘dryness’ of music and text. So, all in all, the best one could say for Or Shall we Die? is that it is “good in parts”.

The modern oratorio, modern both in musical language and in the directness of its confrontation with the modern world, is an exceedingly difficult trick to bring off and it can’t be said that Berkeley and McEwan were wholly successful in this relatively youthful attempt:  McEwan’s libretto strikes me as being, like Berkeley’s music, “good in parts”. Whatever one’s reservations, it was a pleasure to have the chance to hear a live performance of the piece  (I don’t have access to the recording of the work, with Heather Harper and David Wilson-Johnson as soloists and the LSO conducted by Richard Hickox [EMI ASD 2700581], but I have heard it, and my memory is that it was rhythmically less exciting than this performance, though Heather Harper gave a particularly fine reading of ‘Woman’). It would be churlish not to close this review by wishing Michael Berkeley a thoroughly happy sixtieth birthday!

Glyn Pursglove


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