Music for our times
Shelagh Godwin reviews last Saturday’s Epsom Chamber Choir concert at St Martin’s Church.
Imagine writing a piece that means a lot to you and then never hearing it performed. This was the fate of Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week. Composed in the 1920s just as the Soviet regime was banning any religious music, the piece was published in Paris at the behest of the composer in 1927, and scores eventually made it to the United States, but it was not until 2014 that a complete performance and an award-winning recording took place. It has had its enthusiasts since, one of whom, Epsom Chamber Choir’s conductor Jack Apperley, presented a performance on Saturday 23rd March in St Martin’s Parish Church in Epsom.
Based largely on Russian Orthodox chants, Passion Week could not be more different from the sacred music composed by Steinberg’s contemporary and fellow-student Igor Stravinsky. Indeed, it draws more from the influence of his father-in-law Rimsky-Korsakov. It is more reflective in mood than Rachmaninov’s more celebrated Vespers, and the stepwise movement of Orthodox chant pervades the work and the general mood. The texts are Church Slavonic hymns for Holy Week, and are reflective tableaux rather than narrative. The eleven sections tend to sound somewhat the same, but there are great moments, enhanced on Saturday by the Epsom Chamber Choir’s well-co-ordinated ensemble and effective use of excellent soloists from within the choir. Like much Russian choral music of the time, it abounds in low notes for the basses, who dealt with that challenge magnificently.
Interspersed with the hymns of Passion Week were the five deeply moving spirituals from Tippett’s A Child of our Time, which received superb and moving performances from the choir.
A more unfamiliar interjection was Owain Park’s Phos hilaron (Hail gladdening Light), a complex setting of psalms and Greek liturgy. I say complex because it was very difficult to follow the words! It did achieve the desired effect, as did the extremely evocative encore, John Rutter’s heart-rending Prayer for Ukraine, sung in Ukrainian. Entirely appropriate in view of the tragedies of the previous few days.
Shelagh Godwin