London Choral Sinfonia
Michael Waldron conductor
ORCHID CLASSICS ORC100453
This is a most intriguing issue with much to admire. It is no surprise that this composer’s muse has led where it has. Following his organ scholarship at St John’s Cambridge, he completed an M.Phil in Environmental Policy, and his poetic musings on the trees lining the Cam were published by a distinguished private press in 2017.
His music – tonal, accessible, assembled with care, and often recalling the sound-world of John Tavener – responds to these varied influences most directly, notably in using birdsong as a springboard in a non-Messiaen-like fashion. He also employs a form of compositional collage, bringing unadulterated extracts from such as Tallis or Byrd into the mixture, along with substantial organ interludes, meditative and otherwise.
By his own admission, tunes (by which he seems to mean memorable ones) are rare: it is the harmony, often homophonic, that predominates and leads. The obvious danger, that of devising luscious backgrounds on which to peg a vocal line, is not entirely avoided.
The principal work here, an oratorio Out of Eden, is essentially a lamentation for the natural world, and the composer’s principal response to the world’s great crisis. The oppressive heatwave at the time of writing this review seems fearfully appropriate. Settings of Biblical texts, occasionally slightly expanded, form the majority of its libretto, together with the Orthodox Kontakion for the Departed, and Philip Larkin’s The Trees as an inspired finale. An unforgettable recording of a melodious but sadly extinct Haiwaiian bird appears in the second movement.
Although this idea is scarcely new – witness Rautavaara’s Cantus arcticus – Picton-Turbervill follows his own choice of avian contribution with a moving excerpt from Byrd’s Civitas sancti tui, from which description the reader may judge the sweep of this imaginative score.
Environmental activism in music is not infrequent but few examples have gained much of a foothold. Out of Eden, which might be compared favourably in tone and general approach to Richard Harvey’s more substantial and melodramatic oratorio, Plague and the Moonflower, certainly deserves more than a handful of performances. An instrumental suite, Songs of Eden – largely dominated by piano, organ and mallet percussion, included bowed vibraphone – has some bewitching Graingeresque sounds but I found some of its predictable harmonic journeys less compelling.
The choir is finely blended, and the soloists, especially Ed Lyon, are highly accomplished, although Katie Bray’s ample tone is rather overbearing when projected onto her much steadier choral accompaniment. In this case, the lack of printed words (only those for Out of Eden are included) is a drawback; but in other respects, presentation and recording quality are excellent.
Review by Andrew Plant