Concert
King's Cambridge
The Times Hilary Finch
1st April, 2004
Stephen Layton/Britten Sinfonia

Light and darkness met head on under the fan vaulting, when the Britten Sinfonia and Stephen Layton’s fine choir, Polyphony, gave the first of their two Easter concerts, one in Cambridge and one in Norwich. This was Lenten entertainment with a difference, and a capacity audience, rapt and finally rapturous, seemed to know it.

The cry of “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” was where this concert began and ended, and its echoes literally reverberated through the evening. At first, the cry was wordless. Shostakovich dedicated his Eighth String Quartet to the memory of the victims of war and fascism, and the Britten Sinfonia played Rudolf Barshai’s arrangement of the quartet as Chamber Symphony with a clarity and focus which both defied and connived with the acoustic of King ’s College Chapel. It’s an acoustic Layton knows inside out, of course; and his control of pacing and textures left the music with teeth, and even gave it a heightened sense of struggle.

This Shostakovich, a lament for a war-torn Europe, became a pre-echo of the evening’s major work, James MacMillan’s remarkable cantata for choir and string orchestra, Seven Last Words from the Cross.

Ten years on from his composition, the work is still shocking and consoling, lamenting and uplifting all at once. The fusion of King’s reverberating, radiating acoustic and the most meticulous detail drawn by Layton reinforced its wonders: the thrill of opposing sound and silence, melody and chant in the opening Hosanna of forgiveness; the brilliance of each voice flaming together at the top of their registers in Woman, Behold thy Son!; the dark grain of bass lines in Behold the Wood of the Cross; and the long dying falls as life and music expire.

Between these two works of the shadowlands, glowed Morten Lauridsen’s cycle Lux aeterna, a classic of new American choral writing. This light-filled continuum of sacred texts is as simple as MacMillan’s work is sophisticated: Lauridsen intended it to be as accessible to amateurs as to professionals. Renaissance polyphony and Brucknerian close-harmony, Old World structures and New World spirit interwine in a cunningly written score, at once sensuous and spare.

Once again, the music was perfectly tuned to its environment, and Layton exploited both to full advantage. The counterpointing of voices and orchestra was miraculously transparent, as Requiem led to invocation and celebration and back again, and the single word “aeterna” was repeated, echo upon echo, bringing the music full

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