In his lifetime (1637-1707) Dietrich Buxtehude rose to fame in mainland Europe as organist and choirmaster at the Mariankirche, Lubeck. Young musicians travelled there to learn from him – including Bach (who did the 250 mile journey on foot) and Handel, who might have been his successor at Lubeck but for the problem that the job involved marriage to Buxtehude’s daughter. Who was apparently no catch.
In later centuries the music of those younger men eclipsed his own, and he became the stuff of specialists. But he has champions still. And he’s the author of a strange piece that has long caught the imagination of performers around Eastertide: his Membra Jesu nostri patientis sanctissima, or Most Holy Limbs of Our Suffering Jesus.
Written in 1680, it’s a meditational work for voices and small orchestra that effectively does a body scan on the crucified Christ, working upwards from the feet to the knees, hands, side, breast, heart and face. Each item gets its own miniature cantata, with arias and ensembles that take their words either from the Bible or from the myst-ical poem Salve mundi salutare. And through the course of an hour it builds into a sort of passionate autopsy: exposing, intimate, devotional.
What drew Buxtehude to the piece isn’t clear, but his surviving manu-script directs it to be sung with heart- felt humility. And that’s how it was in an extraordinary account given in London by a new, young, period-performance group called Figure. Taking over the bare, white space of the 18th-century Swiss Church, Covent Garden, they did it immersively – with singers weaving in and out of an unseated audience, disarmingly close, backed by projections of the various body-parts. They sang from memory and from the heart. The voices were entrancing, unforced, without overstatement. And the whole thing held together with a keen sense of momentum under the discreet direction (from a chamber organ) of conductor Frederick Waxman.
Hybrid, choreographed concerts of this kind are fashionable now but can leave you thinking a more standard format might have worked as well, and with more comfort. Here, though, it was just right. I felt drawn into the whole experience, deeply moved by its imaginative beauty and reflecting on how close it came to liturgy. A powerful event where the divisions between secular and sacred disappeared.
Last year’s Vaughan Williams anniversary inevitably prompted re-evaluation of his output, but it left me just as sure as ever that his finest work was Job: a Masque for Dancing – a response to that perplexing Bible story about God allowing a good man to suffer. Vaughan Williams approached the story through the eyes of William Blake, whose vivid illustrations to the Book of Job were arguably his finest work as well. And the intention was to create an English ballet score, loosely based around old dance-forms like the pavan, galliard and sarabande rather than the sort of thing you’d find in Paris or the Bolshoi.
Premiered in 1931, its on-stage life was short: too many dancers thought it failed to offer them what they required. But musically it is profoundly beautiful – in an admittedly restrained and often quiet way. I love it unreservedly, and was enthralled by a perform- ance at the Barbican last month that showed how much the BBC Symphony Orchestra under conductor Martyn Brabbins loved it too. Their wrapt, intense performance made a telling contrast with the empty bombast of a misconceived new oratorio that shared the programme: Beowulf by Ian Bell. Where Bell’s piece was a brutal, unintelligible noise devoid of nuance, the Vaughan Williams glowed with subtlety, sincerity and truth – a quality hard to define in music but you know it when you hear it. Job is, in its lyrical serenity, a great work. Spiritual. Magisterial. Never having seen it danced, I wish some ballet company would take it on. Absorption into standard repertoire is overdue.
Going to student opera can be hit and miss. But this month I’m in ecstasy about a double-bill at the Royal College of Music that paired a rare piece by Respighi, Sleeping Beauty in the Woods, with Ravel’s better-known L’Enfant et les Sortileges. Ravel’s is easily the finer score, about a fractious child who mistreats animals and household objects to the point where they collectively take their revenge. The storyline of the Respighi you can guess. Both are operas that need magical production; and they got it with a vengeance here from everyone involved, especially Michael Pavelka whose designs had a crazy brilliance surpassing anything I’ve ever seen on a conservatoire stage. It was creativity in overdrive. And how he did it on the budget that a student show commands, I’ve no idea.
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