Always uncompromising in his programming, Vladimir Jurowski’s latest concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir juxtaposed Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli (Mass in Time of War) with John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, both works written in response to crises at turning points in history. Haydn’s Mass dates from 1796 as the French revolutionary wars began to swing against the Habsburg empire. Transmigration was commissioned as a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere in 2002.
Adams refused to label the work a memorial or requiem, describing it as “a ‘memory space’… a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”. The text assembles a documentary collage of phrases from missing-person notices and flyers posted in lower Manhattan, lists of victims’ names, a repeated quote (“I see water and buildings”) from a flight attendant on American Airlines flight 11. A sustained elegy for orchestra, choir, and children’s chorus (the Tiffin Youth Choir here) unfolds against prerecorded tapes of street sounds, sirens and a voice, first a child’s then a man’s, tonelessly repeating the word “missing”. This is slow, at times unvarying music, but acrid dissonances gradually pile up during its course, reaching a wrenching climax before the exhausted, resigned close. It was all superbly controlled by Jurowski, and played and sung with sustained, fervent intensity.
Haydn’s Mass, in contrast, ostensibly expresses greater certainties, both in his unwavering faith in God and in the idea of eventual victory, though the trumpets and drums that haunt the sombre Agnus Dei undercut the optimism and linger in the memory as the closing jubilation fades. There was plenty of drama in Jurowski’s urgent, pressured approach, the tautly focused choral singing, and an almost operatic solo quartet. Haydn gives the tenor (elegant Rupert Charlesworth) and mezzo (Hanna Hipp, very declamatory) too little to do, though, leaving the honours to soprano (Anna Devin) and bass (handsome-sounding Trevor Eliot Bowes).
Both works, of course, are big public statements, but in between came something altogether more personal: Kurtág’s Petite Musique Solennelle, written in 2015 to mark Pierre Boulez’s 90th birthday. It is a work of aphoristic brevity and darkly shifting tone colour, here impeccably played and beautifully conducted.
