Various: Conquering the Antarctic (Concert Review - The Times, 2012)
If you want to put Britain’s current cold snap into perspective, you couldn’t do better than attend this touring concert: an entire programme about Captain Scott, accompanied by readings from his journal and photographs of his ill-fated trek across the Antarctic a century ago. What was the temperature outside the hall in Birmingham on Friday? Minus one? As the title of Cecilia McDowall’sSeventy Degrees Below Zero reminded us, poor old Scott and his team died in cold beyond all imagining. Mind you, it’s tough on Amundsen, who reached the South Pole first. Yet Scott now has a whole evening of music in his honour, while the Norwegian (as far as I know) hasn’t inspired a single tune.
McDowall’s piece, a song cycle for tenor and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Scott Polar Research Institute, improved markedly when she reached her third and last movement: a setting of Scott’s elegiac letter “to my widow”. In music of rich neo-Romantic expressivity she uncovered the anguish, pain and desperation beneath Scott’s stiff upper lip. The other movements, setting Seán Street’s complex, metaphorical poems on aspects of Scott’s expedition, were less successful. McDowall has a penchant for Britten-like melismas, but she doesn’t yet have Britten’s uncanny knack of finding a striking musical metaphor to unlock a literary one. Still, the songs were superbly delivered by Robert Murray. Called on to make a perilous rising-ninth ascent on the words “God bless you my own darling”, he was heartbreakingly poignant.
Surrounding the McDowall, of course, was Vaughan Williams. First came five extracts from his film score for Scott of the Antarctic, interspersed with yet more journal entries, touchingly read by Hugh Bonneville. Then we heard the work that grew out of the film: hisSinfonia Antartica. Passionately played by the City of London Sinfonia under Stephen Layton, it sounded like an underrated masterpiece, full of stark bitonal clashes and turbulent undercurrents evoking hopeless struggles with implacable Nature. Such music conjures its own visions, so the projected photographs of the 1912 expedition seemed superfluous where they weren’t misconceived. The spine-chilling entry of the organ, for example, surely signifies some terrifying glacier on the horizon. Here it was matched to a cute picture of ponies.
Reviewed by Richard Morrison
The Times