It is good again to encounter the team of composer
Will Todd and his librettist Ben Dunwell, both only still in their
early thirties. Unfortunately I missed Todd’s opera The Blackened
Man when it was recently given a studio performance at
Covent Garden, but here is another large-scale choral piece to
follow his earlier successes of Midwinter and The Burning
Road, which were so striking on CD. Todd and Dunwell found
their artistic feet at Bristol University with the opera Isambard
Kingdom Brunel, a suite from which I reviewed in News
at the time, (72 Dec 1996 p 294) and which also appears on the
Midwinter CD. This dramatic gift is reflected in Todd’s
choral works, which have a strong narrative flow. This is very
much tonal music and it communicates through striking invention,
a sure feeling for pacing large forces, a film composer’s command
of the orchestra, and a quite personal feeling for drama and wide-spanning
evocation of a big subject.
Here Todd is fortunate to have top-line performers
- remarkably strong forces, a large choral body, fine committed
soloists and the Hallé Orchestra - at his disposal. The
performance is grandly characterised by conductor Christopher
Austin – long a champion of Todd from Bristol days. It fully reflects
the excitement of the occasion for which it was written in 1995,
for the millennium anniversary of the Diocese of Durham, in Durham
Cathedral, though now revised. The recording which was made in
the BBC’s Studio 7 at Manchester in June 2001 was produced by
Andrew Keener.
The music fall into ten movements underlining
the narrative thread and with dramatic descriptive moments, which
are more or less self-explanatory – ‘The Call’, ‘The Storm’, ‘Man
Unkind’, ‘Plague and Healing’, ‘Enthronement’, ‘Lindisfarne’,
‘Vikings’, ‘The Tide’, ‘Journeying’, ‘Prayer’. The welling triplets
of the opening are immediately gripping as the high-lying soprano
– Patricia Rosario in her element here - sings of Cuthbert being
called by his bishops to become Bishop of Lindisfarne. If, in
the punctuating and concluding "Glory be to God", we
find more than a hint of Walton’s choral writing, it is non the
worse for that when so memorably done. Having been drawn into
the story, Cuthbert’s narration – a gripping tenor solo, strongly
sung by John Hudson – puts Todd’s personal stamp on the music.
As lovers of Todd’s previous CDs will know, every
so often we are suddenly brought up short by a stunning set piece
which will have you hitting the repeat button on your CD player.
Here it is surely the wonderful calm at the opening of the sixth
movement in which the chorus, now in 16 parts, evokes the pull
of the tides, building to a thrilling climax. Ben Dunwell’s libretto
gives the composer many opportunities at such moments: "Lindisfarne,
island of tides, Island of prayer. Rough rocks, cliffs and scar,
Washed by the wind, and by the tide." The spacious evocation
of Cuthbert’s death which follows is clearly the work of a composer
used to writing for the stage, and is strongly presented by John
Hudson, effective not least because every word is intelligible.
Todd sets up his uplifting finale with two solos.
First in ‘The Tide’ a wide-spanning soprano solo, predominantly
slow, the angel meditates on life and death. This is followed
by the much shorter ‘Journeying’, recalling how the monks fled
Lindisfarne in the face of Viking raids and wandered Northumberland
for over a century. The last movement, running just on 12 minutes,
recounts how when the monks passed near Durham, Cuthbert appeared
in dreams naming Durham as their true home. Here Todd completes
the story and his forces join together to sing Hosannas, which
in his excellent notes Michael White describes as ‘Ecstatic .
. . Saint Cuthbert is a feel-good oratorio, designed to send it
audience out into the world uplifted and encouraged’. I could
not agree more; it must have been a wonderful experience in the
resonant acoustic of Durham Cathedral.
Finding this CD in the shops may be a problem
because it is issued under a non-trade label. Unless you are likely
to visit Lindisfarne or Durham, order forms can be found from
Will Todd’s website and this is probably the easiest way to get
it, by post. I predict you will be hooked! But this was written
eight years ago – it would be good to hear some of the composer’s
more recent music, such as And My Friend, written for the
first anniversary of September 11th or his setting
of the Venerable Bede’s Christus est Stella.
Lewis Foreman
see also review
by Neil Horner
Patricia Rozario, Angel (soprano)