St Paul’s Cathedral
Handel – Te Deum for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV
278
Adrian Thomas – The Idea of Peace (world premiere)
Handel – Jubilate for the Peace of Utrecht, HWV 279
Gillian Keith (soprano)
Lucy Hall (soprano)
Kamilla Dunstan
(mezzo-soprano)
Emily Kyte (mezzo-soprano)
Mark Wilde (tenor)
Martin Hässler (baritone)
Choristers of Utrecht Cathedral Chior School
Toonkunstkoor Utrecht
Canon Michale Hampel (narrator)
English Chamber Orchestra
Jos Vermunt (conductor)
The 1713 Treaty of Utrecht,
which established the Peace of Utrecht, concluded the long-running War of the
Spanish Succession and signalled the final nail in the coffin for Louis XIV’s
aspirations to universal monarchy. Accompanying commercial treaties – the
Treaty itself actually a series of treaties – laid the way for economic
expansion, so the ‘peace’ seems an especially appropriate settlement for the
City of London Festival to be celebrating its tercentenary. Given the death
toll, variously estimated at somewhere between 400,000 and 1.251 million, I
could not also but help think of Voltaire’s Candide,
in which the tradition of the military Te
Deum joins the list of items for excoriation:
There was never anything so
gallant, so spruce, so brilliant, and so well disposed as the two armies.
Trumpets, fifes, hautboys, drums, and cannon made music such as Hell itself had
never heard. The cannons first of all laid flat about six thousand men on each
side; the muskets swept away from this best of worlds nine or ten thousand
ruffians who infested its surface. The bayonet was also a sufficient reason
for the death of several thousands. The whole might amount to thirty thousand
souls. Candide, who trembled like a philosopher, hid himself as well as he
could during this heroic butchery.
At length, while the two kings
were causing Te Deum to be sung each
in his own camp, Candide resolved to go and reason elsewhere on effects and
causes. He passed over heaps of dead and dying, and first reached a
neighbouring village; it was in cinders, it was an Abare village which the
Bulgarians had burnt according to the laws
of war. Here, old men covered with wounds, beheld their wives, hugging their
children to their bloody breasts, massacred before their faces; there, their
daughters, disembowelled and breathing their last after having satisfied the
natural wants of Bulgarian heroes; while others, half burnt in the flames,
begged to be despatched. The earth was strewed with brains, arms, and legs.
It is
no coincidence that the eighteenth century was especially ripe with schemes for ‘perpetual peace’, from writers such as the Abbé de Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, and
Kant. Not that any of them had the slightest chance of being considered as
anything but wild utopianism, as the European states system continued to
dictate foreign policy. (We might bitterly recall New Labour’s claim to have been
adopting something called an ‘ethical foreign policy’ whilst launching a series
of murderous invasions.)
Returning
to 1713, Handel, newly settled in London, in today’s unlovely parlance an ‘economic
migrant’, wrote his Te Deum and Jubilate for the Chapel Royal, and had them formally
premiered in St Paul’s Cathedral in July, as here, though a public dress
rehearsal had actually taken place in March of that year. It took my ears a
while to adjust to the notorious St Paul’s acoustic, the dome swallowing up so
much of the sound, and the reverberation continuing longer than anywhere else I
can think of. Jos Vermunt wisely did not push the music of the Jubilate; trying
to do battle with the echo would only result in victory for the latter. There
were even times when that echo helped, or at least added a notable additional
quality to the performance, for instance in the halo surrounding the words ‘Holy,
Holy, Holy’. In this relatively early Handel, there are already borrowings from
some of his Italian music, but also kinship conscious or otherwise, with French
ceremonial music – Lully and Charpentier – also made its mark, albeit with a
welcome lack of bombast. There is plangency too, here conveyed with skill both
by the ECO, oboes especially, and the soloists. ‘When thou tookest upon thee to
deliver man’ was taken wonderfully slowly, and successfully sustained, for
which particular credit should go to mezzo-soprano, Kamilla Dunstan. The
following a cappella quartet, ‘When
thou hadst overcome the sharpness of death’ seemed to look forward to the unaccompanied
chorus, ‘Since by man came death,’ from the Messiah,
benefiting from excellent balancing between the soloists; it likewise is
followed by concerted rejoicing. Echt-Handelian
trumpets made a fine appearance upon ‘O Lord, save thy people,’ though
curiously accompanied by a lengthy ad lib
from an audience noseblower; his command of rhythm was more commendable than
his timing. All of the soloists acquitted themselves well. Having already
mentioned Dunstan, I should also single out the baritone, Martin Hässler, who
combined beauty of tone with verbal clarity and understanding; I hope to hear
more of him.
Choral
singing, somewhat hampered by the acoustic, seemed to gain a degree of focus in
the premiere of Adrian Thomas’s The Idea
of Peace, the Toonkunstkoor Utrecht now joined by choristers from Utrecht
Cathedral Choir School. The City of Utrecht had commissioned the work, which
here received its first performance. Alas, whilst performances, not least from
the two soloists, Gillian Keith and Mark Wilde, seemed excellent, the work
itself disappointed. Hampered by an over-enthusiastic gathering of texts from
disparate sources by Arjen Eijenraam, Thomas had little success in transforming
lines such as ‘People are infinitely precious/Take them as they are,’ or ‘Bring
dialogue, benefit, and joy into the world’, into something idiomatically vocal.
He was certainly fortunate, however, in having Keith to despatch words of Queen
Anne, ‘We have this business of Peace so much at heart’, with pinpoint
melismatic skill. (The accompanying chimes sounded an uncomfortably ‘New Age’
note, however.) Vague orientalism, for instance in a prominent cello solo, put
me in mind of another occasional piece, from one Francis Grier, my first Cambridge
college, Jesus, endured for its quincentenary; the sole comfort from this work’s
protracted progress was that none of us would be likely to hear it ever again.
If soft-centred, anodyne harmonies, allied to excessive reliance upon the harp
and weirdly jaunty settings of words such as ‘Non Violence, Truthfulness,
Tolerance/Respect and Partnership not only be/renewed though Kingdoms,
States/Dominions and Provinces...,’ be your thing, then you might have looked
more kindly upon it. Or, as a tedious refrain had it, ‘Listen, talk, and learn
and flourish together,’ might have been a little more the order of the day; to
my ears, it sounded more akin to the soundtrack for a primary school ‘learning
activity’, run hopelessly out of control. How one longed, amongst this
paradoxically glib worthiness, for a true message of the horrors of war: A Survivor from Warsaw perhaps, or Il canto sospeso.
What
one longed for still more was the return of Handel, whose Jubilate therefore
proved all the more welcome. Dunstan’s duetting with trumpet proved a delight,
as indeed did all the expressive instrumental and vocal solos (Handel limits
himself to three here). The darkly chromatic setting of ‘For the Lord is
gracious, His mercy is everlasting,’ peered forward towards Mozart, who would
surely have loved Handel’s setting, had he known it. A resplendent final
doxology brought together the ECO and choir in harmony infinitely more
convincing than that attempted during the previous piece, enthusiastically
presented though it might have been. Handel nevertheless emerged unscathed,
ready for another three hundred years.
