RECORDING OF THE MONTH
Bob CHILCOTT (b.1955)
The Angry Planet
Five Days that Changed the World [19:24]
The Miracle of the Spring [14:08]
The Angry Planet – an Environmental Cantata [46:48]
Gemma Beeson (piano), Markus Gruett (timpani), Olivia Robinson (soprano), Eleanor Minney (alto), Emma Tring (soprano), Nigel Carman (percussion)
BBC Singers, The Bach Choir, The Young Singers, London Youth Choir, Finchley Children’s Group/David Hill
rec. 2015, BBC Studios, Maida Vale, London
SIGNUM SIGCD422 [33:39 + 46:48]
The choral music of Bob Chilcott is being performed with great
enthusiasm by choirs up and down the country these days, and throughout the
wider world too. It’s not difficult to see why; firstly he is a composer
of great skill who has an innate understanding of the human voice through
his experience of directing choirs, and before that as a member of the King’s
Singers and as a Kings College Chorister. He also has a fine melodic gift,
and a feeling for topics that will excite singers, particularly young people.
You can see that from the subjects of the pieces here – crucial moments
in human history in Five Days that Changed the World, and the beauty
of nature and concerns for its preservation in the other two works. His unerring
instinct for what will ‘work’ chorally means that he can even
get away with setting an apparently unsingable phrase such as ‘I clettered
the dishes, washed the pots’ in the fourth number of Five Days,
a song dealing with the discovery of penicillin.
These five striking songs make a fine suite, well within the capabilities
of good amateur singers, as long as they have an excellent pianist and percussionist
available. They are perhaps not all equally successful; the first three are
all effective and, in the case of ‘Friday 1st August 1834:
The Abolition of Slavery’ really moving in its hymn-like simplicity.
The other two don’t make quite such an impact, though the mysterious
‘blurring’ of choral textures in the final number describing the
view of earth by the first man in space is undeniably striking. The BBC Singers
perform this well, with admirably clear diction, and the Finchley Children’s
Music Group add the demanding semi-chorus parts, coping almost perfectly with
the tricky rhythms of ‘The Quick Brown Fox’ and its brilliant
typewriter music.
The Miracle of the Spring, a cantata dealing with water shortage
in the third world, was written, like the previous work, in 2013. It beautifully
combines various percussion instruments with the choir; the parts are simple
— originally intended to be possible to play by members of the choir
— and the sounds of glockenspiel, log drums and mark tree (sometimes
known as a ‘bell tree’) colour the various songs in a magical
way. These are very light sounds, and the engineers deserve much praise for
bringing them far enough forward to be heard properly.
The major work on this issue, occupying the whole of CD2, is the cantata The
Angry Planet. Environmental cantatas (the description Chilcott uses)
are thick on the ground; Peter Rose and Anne Conlon have done several, including
the ubiquitous Yanamamo, and Richard Harvey’s Plague and
the Moonflower has recently been re-issued by Altus. The concept has
a – dare I say it - rather 1980s feel about it, when schools first started
bothering their pupils with ‘The Environment’, and before controversy
and dissent began to creep in. Then there’s the ever-present danger
of being accused of hypocrisy; an acquaintance of mine rather cattily remarked
“These people – jetting around the planet scolding ordinary folk
for riding their mopeds!’
So how does The Angry Planet, composed for the 2012 Henry Wood Proms,
measure up? The other works such as those mentioned above exist in that strange
stylistic world bounded by the stage musical (principally Les Mis)
and film music of the Star Wars genre. Chilcott is in a different
league as a creator – he has his own distinctive style, plus the imagination
to conjure up new forms of beauty from his resources. The challenge he set
himself here was a daunting one; to compose a totally unaccompanied choral
work, including children’s voices, lasting over three-quarters of an
hour. That takes some doing, for composer and performers alike; but he has
managed it, largely by keeping the harmonic movement fairly limited, and securing
variety by contrast of textures and motion.
The result is a genuinely beautiful work, with an expressive intensity unmatched
by more glitzy compositions. Chilcott has found in the poet Charles Bennett
an ideal collaborator, and the poems are beautiful things in themselves. Bennett
sets the scene in an English wood, experienced over a six-hour period, from
midnight until 6 a.m., and the piece is divided into four movements, with
three or four songs in each. The tranquillity and natural beauty of the wood
is contrasted with the brutality and vandalism of humans, always furiously
ground clearing and road building.
The children’s voices chime out brightly after the thoughtfulness of
the first two songs; they represent the cheerful, irrepressible weeds, wild
plants mankind does its best to eradicate, but which just keep coming back.
Chilcott writes melodies which have a forthright character, but are not quite
as simple as they sound, and Finchley Children’s Music Group perform
with a greedy enthusiasm that is utterly delightful.
The third movement devotes much of its attention to species which are threatened
– such as the horseshoe bat or the polar bear - or have already been
rendered extinct – like the barbary lion or the bushwren. Here, Chilcott
makes highly effective use of what he calls an ‘exaggerated spoken style’,
carried out with plenty of dramatic projection by the mixed youth choirs,
London Youth Choir and the Young Singers. Some of the numbers are highly enjoyable
in and for themselves, for example ‘Lutra lutra’, which celebrates
the otter’s ‘slender and lithe long romp’. The final number,
‘Perhaps’ is appropriately ambiguous in its final suspension –
musical and emotional.
This work, together with the other more recent ones on CD 1, is a fine
achievement, and simply adds to Bob Chilcott’s profile as one of the
most brilliant composers of vocal music around today. He is also a major ambassador
for the simple undying joy of singing.
Gwyn Parry-Jones
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