A Sumptuous Programme
RODERIC DUNNETT reports from the 2024 Three Choirs Festival in Worcester
Classical Music Daily, September 2024
Ian Venables’ setting of the Requiem is, by any standards, a work of ravishing beauty. Every feature of it – the masterly way he employs just a handful of enchanting short phrases or motifs, beautifully related; the refined judgment he displays to elaborating every movement or section; the delicacy and intensity he brings to each evolving phrase; the wisdom with which he treats each line of the text, confirm the work as an undoubted masterpiece.
And on this occasion, his amazingly secure and mature approach to his orchestration, to judge by the rapturous applause following its performance throughout the cathedral, it seems that this work, perhaps above all, was a triumph for the (superbly polished) youthful choir, the members of the Philharmonia, and the composer. It was Venables’ second breathtaking participation in the week’s events. Midway, he offered a gorgeously and finely crafted setting of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis (Evening Canticles). He has in fact previously composed several enticing, indeed uplifting anthems. Each has the mark of his special command of word setting. Word setting is indeed his speciality. He is nationally, and increasingly internationally, famous for his very considerable number of acclaimed, arguably brilliant, song settings. They have drawn from him some dozen cycles, each in its way utterly inspiring. To say he is England’s finest and easily most accomplished composer of Art Song is surely an understatement.
Since its premiere at Gloucester Cathedral (under Adrian Partington, who conducted here, and who actually founded this youth chorus, which he finessed from its very outset), Venables has orchestrated for the Requiem this breathtakingly beautiful version, wholly original, amazingly subdued, subtly poignant, treating that modest, compactly offset series of expressive motifs, the whole an example of remarkably evocative, often poignant setting of the contrasted passages of text. Venables’, exquisitely crafted, deeply felt Requiem has been hailed everywhere as a masterpiece, and with good reason.
To hear it here with the Philharmonia Orchestra felt, to put it mildly, all but a miracle. It was typically bold of Worcester’s current festival to include it as a major item in this season’s evening programme. And it paid wonderful dividends.
So much of the Requiem is finely subdued, and so perfectly refined. The opening Introit and the Kyries, for instance, are both profoundly reflective and utterly captivating thanks to the marvellous intimacy and restraint Venables brings to them both: the Kyries – with an entrancing start for female voices – are pleading and supplicatory; and both embrace (as the composer says) an impassioned climax; but the tenderness is revisited, with the exquisitely created melismatic idea (motif, or motto) greatly contributing, time and again, to the gorgeous calm of the whole.
By way of variety, it is the men’s voices that attain prominence in the longer, dramatic, even ‘anguished’ Offertorium. The expression here alternates from forcefulnesss and urgency (a prayer ‘de poenis inferni’ – to set free from the pains of Hell), and the grim ‘jaws of the lion – treated to a big, domineering passage – leaning into more optimistic, hopeful sequences (‘We offer you sacrifices and prayers of praise’). Venables has aptly proposed the term ‘Sturm und Drang’ for this multifaceted movement. It fits.
Not surprisingly the intimately explored and repeated two lines of the Pie Jesu, which Venables decided to set only subsequently, as a form of memorial, is one of the Requiem’s most expressive parts; not least because he has opted to set these moving words a cappella – without orchestra. The impact is mesmerising. Yet comparably beautiful is the Sanctus, drawing on another of his mottoes (descending like a kind of inverse), which again he presents pianissimo, with notable use of paired voices, the gentlest of organ parts, and delicately subtle instrumental touches. Like the Offertorium, the Agnus Dei starts with the men, the female voices later added above, and is one of the places where Venables’ use of judicious repetition produces such an alluring, intensifying effect.
The Libera Me, again like the Offertorium, cries out for relief from the terrors of judgment and death. The tenors and basses – splendidly sung here – are again prominent, and skilfully conceived, and more or less trudging during the fiercely threatening Dies Irae. Yet despite its menacing, deep foreboding and even patches of dissonance quite a lot even of this movement is sung comparatively piano. And the effect – perhaps the irony – is all the greater. The inspired appearance in the final movement, the Lux Aeterna, of a solo oboe playing almost dazzlingly one of the salient motifs, just as a threatening, warning trumpet call or telling use of echo in the flutes during the Sanctus, exemplifies the ingenuity – indeed mastery – with which Venables has carried off the orchestration.