A PROGRAMME entitled For The Fallen was always going to be sombre, but it was absolutely in tune with this year’s centenary Remembrance commemorations. Significantly, all but one of the pieces was by a British composer. One was a world premiere.
Throughout the evening the reading of letters between Vera Brittain and her fiancé in the trenches, Robert Leighton, brought home the stark reality of warfare, as opposed to the often loftier sentiments of the poetry in the choral settings. That dichotomy was reflected poignantly in Judith Bingham’s newly commissioned Arcadia.
The work’s first half is built round a Rimbaud sonnet discovering the body of a soldier, killed in the Franco-Prussian War, lying in a verdant valley in the spring sun. Robin Leanse’s translation of the Rimbaud was followed at once by his own poetic reaction to it.
Bingham’s gentle responses to Rimbaud – a burbling stream, a floating cloud – change markedly with spoken revelation of the bullet-holes in the body. With Leanse, her tone becomes ever more violent, reaching an astringent anger at the repetition of such atrocity at Ypres, before leaving us with a chill wind of desolate reflection in her dying close.
Douglas Guest’s chorale-like setting of Binyon’s For the Fallen, Edward Bairstow’s honest arrangement of Gibbons’s Jesu, Grant Me This, Francis Pott’s impressionistic The Souls Of The Righteous (with tenor soloist Dan Hunt), and Alexander L’Estrange’s close-harmony setting of Thomas’s Rain, were especially effective in this moving anthology.
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