Review: A Caedmon Symphony
UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORAL SOCIETY
KING’S COLLEGE CHAPEL CHOIR
RUTH PALMER Violin
THE MUSIC HALL, ABERDEEN, Sunday, 18 November 2012
Alan Cooper writes...
As well as this being Aberdeen University Music’s annual large scale choral and orchestral extravaganza, Sunday’s performance also signalled the concluding event in the programme of this year’s sound Festival – and what a spectacular conclusion it turned out to be. Two decidedly accomplished orchestral performances conducted by Christopher Gray were followed in the second half by the world premiere of a remarkable new work by Geoff Palmer, A Cædmon Symphony. Many, though not all of the new music premiered at this year’s sound Festival has been small scale chamber music but this Symphony was a titanic work and not just regarding the forces required to perform it which with the huge choir and orchestra filling the Music Hall stage was tending towards Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder or even, though perhaps not quite, Mahler’s Symphony of a Thousand. When I say not just regarding the required forces, I refer to the whole concept of the work. Its subject is “the creation of all things” leading from the big bang and the formation of galaxies to a headlong rush through history including sound references to both world wars right on to the present day. This at least is what Geoff Palmer tells us in his programme note. That is all very well but what concerns us here is the music itself. What about that?
The first thing I must say regards the sterling quality of the performance itself. This is a work to challenge the resources and commitment of the best professional chorus and orchestra. To get such an accomplished performance from university performers who are not rehearsing all week and every week was a real triumph. In a composition dealing with “all things” that is not unlike what Geoff Palmer has managed to pack into this work. Electro-acoustic elements were merged comfortably, sometimes almost subliminally with choral or orchestral textures. The choral and vocal sounds ranged from chattering and laughter, sighs and whispers or hissing to full blown excerpts from the hymn tune Eternal Father Strong to save and then a First World War song. There were even words from one of Hitler’s speeches declaimed dramatically by Frauke Jurgensen. The extensive section of orchestral writing ranged from pure abstraction to fresh tonality. With so many radically diverse stylistic elements crammed into a single work you would assume that this would result in nothing more than a stylistic mishmash - but not at all. One of Palmer’s greatest achievements in this work lay in how remarkably well the whole thing held together and made sense musically. This surely was owed to a considerable extent to Christopher Gray and his mass of splendid performers.
Over the years I have attended untold thousands of concerts and I have noticed that if a piece is not working or if a particular performance is quite simply boring, people inevitably start coughing. There were many very quiet moments in this piece and absolutely nobody coughed. That surely says more than anything else about the quality of the performance and the way in which this astonishingly diverse music succeeded in holding the attention of the audience for nearly an hour.
The Palmer family contributed even more to the success of the evening because Geoff’s daughter Ruth Palmer was the soloist in a truly entrancing performance of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in e minor. Her playing was admirably free-flowing fluent and delicately precise. Although the outer movements were taken noticeably fast this certainly did not detract in any way from the smooth and lavish spirit of the music. This concerto is by no means an easy work for the orchestra let alone for the soloist, but the members of the University Symphony Orchestra rose triumphantly to the challenge of making sure that their playing complemented the performance of their star soloist.
Wagner’s Prelude to Act One of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was given a strong and sturdy performance with a particularly forward contribution from the tuba. I did not mind that at all. I really liked the tuba.
© Alan Cooper 2012
