Maybe it’s the intensity of the times that we are all living through. Maybe it’s music’s power to evoke heaven and heartbreak in a single phrase. Maybe it’s just indignation at the Arts Council cutting all of its grant to the terrific Britten Sinfonia. Probably it is all three mixed together. Whatever the reason, this season opening Sinfonia visit to London with the soprano Elizabeth Watts clicked from start to finish.
The peaks came in the two works featuring Watts as soloist. Yet what a contrast between them. Gerald Finzi’s Dies Natalis, setting works by the 17th century metaphysical poet Thomas Traherne, is a song cycle of innocent spirituality. The songs are Blakean in their imaginative power, and in this performance they felt like balm to the soul in our time of war. The cycle is most often performed by tenors, but Watts made a compelling case for preferring the tender purity of the female voice in these hymns to our better natures.
Richard Blackford’s Songs of Nadia Anjuman has music of exquisite delicacy too. But it sets hymns from a far darker place. Writing clandestinely under the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s, Anjuman’s work was published after their overthrow. But in 2005, aged 25, she was beaten to death by her husband, whose family believed that her writing disgraced their honour. There is love and beauty in the writing, along with fear and defiance. Blackford’s settings employ a rich and varied palette which captures the fragility, the sudden outpourings and, in spite of all, the indomitability. Watts sang with a commitment that was almost overwhelming, as well as conducting.
These vocal heights were folded inside a programme of new and old string music, relishingly played. Ryan Latimer’s Pound of Cure, a premiere, was witty and playful, propulsive and angular, and exuberantly performed. Dobrinka Tabakova’s Barbican Glade, for string trio and orchestra, was ritualistic and cannily textured, with a beguiling harmonic eeriness at both opening and close. Elgar’s Serenade for Strings, early harbinger of so much to come, is a timeless charmer. But it was awkwardly placed at the end of the programme while most of us were probably still absorbing the power of the Anjuman settings.
