Gustav Holst composed around a dozen operas. Most of them are early works that have still never been performed, and only one of the others is heard at all regularly nowadays. But that exception, Sāvitri, is one of the gems of early 20th-century British music, and the finest product of Holst’s preoccupation with Indian culture.
One of the great virtues of the one-act work is that it’s easy to present in the concert hall. No elaborate staging is required – the story, from the Sanskrit epic the Mahābhārata, of how Sāvitri outwits Death to save her husband Satyavān, is uncomplicated, and Holst presents it in an utterly economical way. The performance that formed the centrepiece of the Britten Sinfonia’s concert was prefaced by four of Holst’s Choral Hymns from the Rig Veda, and presented on the bare Barbican platform, with the wordless female chorus (the Britten Sinfonia Voices) out of sight at the back of the stage and three members of the Pagrav Dance Company, choreographed by Urja Desai Thakore, providing a delicate tracery of quiet movement around the leads.
Somehow, though, in that concert hall space the emotional impact of the work was dissipated; the individual performances – Kathryn Rudge was Sāvitri, Anthony Gregory Satyavān and Ross Ramgobin Death – were all fine (though one would sometimes have liked to hear more of their words), and Mark Elder extracted real dramatic intensity from the ensemble of 12 players, but the magic that Sāvitri can generate from its graceful vocal lines and spare orchestral commentary just never happened.
Elder and the Britten Sinfonia strings had begun the three-part concert with Grace Williams’s Sea Sketches – short, atmospheric pieces bundling together a range of modernist influences – and Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge, in a performance that emphasised the work’s serious side more than its youthful exuberance. And to close the evening, the violinist Jacqueline Shave, in her last concert as the Britten Sinfonia’s leader, appeared with the tabla player Kuljit Bhamra and guitarist John Parricelli in a selection of her own pieces that seemed to cross all kind of musical boundaries: western and Indian, classical, folk and jazz. Holst, you suspect, would have approved of the fusion.
