I was sixteen years old the first time I found myself in the
same room as a professional tenor. Martyn Hill it was, and he
had ventured up to the North of England, probably taking his
life in his hands, to sing in my school’s production of
Saint
Nicolas. I was struggling at the bottom half of the piano
duet when Hill’s opening phrase “Across the tremendous
bridge” almost blew me away. Nobody had ever told me that
a real singer’s voice was as loud as that. My concentration
was shot to pieces for most of the rehearsal.
Some two years earlier
A Ceremony of Carols and
Peter
Grimes had converted me, if I may put it that way, to the
music of Benjamin Britten, a profound admiration that continues
to this day.
Saint Nicolas was great fun to do. I don’t
know how many times I have come back to it since then, but I
certainly haven’t listened to it, nor looked at the score,
for many years. There are some marvellous things in it. I remember
being fascinated by the musical sleight of hand the composer
employed in the first movement, where the violins - just one
of them at first - seemed to be playing in keys totally opposed
to what was going on in the rest of the ensemble. I thought it
the best of the movements, and still do. In the second movement
the birth of the Saint is recounted in music which is a foretaste
of Sammy’s bath in
The Little Sweep, and the tenor’s
sudden “God be glorified!”, as the adult Nicolas,
after the series of exclamations taken by a boy treble, is pure
theatre. One can almost hear the slap of the water on the side
of the boat in
He journeys to Palestine, and the music
is beautifully becalmed once the storm abates. Then the passages
for the main choir in
His piety and marvellous works provided
interesting material for those of us struggling with four-part
harmony at the time. But the rosy tint has faded with the years.
The work was composed to celebrate the centenary of Lancing College,
Peter Pears’ old school, and frankly, I don’t think
the composer’s heart was in the job. The solo tenor writing
is masterly but its intermittently neurotic character now seems
at odds with the rest of the work. Britten’s idea that
the “congregation” sings the hymns which close each
half of the work was novel and might just work; but the scrubbing
strings that accompany the hymns are dispiriting, and they seemed
much better integrated into the drama when he returned to the
idea later, in
Noye’s Fludde. It felt like heresy,
at sixteen, to find the fugal writing which precedes the first
hymn self-conscious and uninspired; and I never dared even entertain
the thought, as I now do, that the whole of the last movement
is so poor that one wonders why so fastidious and self-critical
a composer allowed it to see the light of day.
This is a predictably fine performance under the sympathetic
guidance of Matthew Best. Anthony Rolfe Johnson plays Nicolas
with great intelligence and understanding, but he sounds rather
strained at times. Then again, so does Philip Langridge in the
rival Naxos version, recorded in the same church eight years
later by Collins. I marginally prefer this version as I find
Matthew Best’s reading rather too affectionate at times.
In
His piety and marvellous works, for example, the tendency
to linger over cadence points only adds to the already dangerously
saccharine atmosphere, and I prefer Steuart Bedford’s simpler
way with the music, both here and elsewhere. This is a marginal
point, however, and a matter of taste. The choral singing and
orchestral playing on the Hyperion issue are exemplary.
There is more good than bad, on balance, in
Saint Nicolas,
but even so, the first few notes of Britten’s exquisite
Op. 27, written some six years earlier, and which follows on
the disc, come as something of a relief. Britten had collaborated
with Auden during his years in the United States, but the rather
strait-laced composer felt increasingly ill at ease with the
poet’s far from straight-laced lifestyle. The three poems
that make up the text were dedicated to Britten, and hardly represent
a conventional homage to music’s patron saint. Indeed,
Saint Ben is really the subject, or rather, the saint that Auden
would have liked Ben to become. It is a difficult text but one
which Britten quite brilliantly translates into music - and I
use the phrase deliberately. The choral writing is astonishingly
accomplished, full of light and air, and Britten rarely penned
a passage as beautiful as the one beginning with the words “O
dear white children casual as birds”. It is beautifully
sung here by soprano soloist Janet Coxwell, and the magnificent
choir give as fine an account of the piece as I have ever heard.
William Hedley
Anthony Rolfe Johnson (tenor) 
