Awakening Shadows is a moving and theatrical exploration of the Five Canticles of Benjamin Britten – with an antiphonal response of new music by the Australian composer, Luke Styles
The. Canticles were written across Britten’s lifetime and respond deeply to their chosen poetry by:
There is a wonderful febrile quality to these works, theatrical yet meditative, light and darkness intermingled.
They are self-contained pieces that engender strong emotional impacts across their relatively short time frames. They explore ecstasy, love and duty, the horrors of war, the ordinariness of miracles and the fluidity of self. Their melismas are ardently beautiful, distilled, poetic, shining, humorous and cathartic.
Jack Symonds as music director and Imara Savage the director ensured they operated within a tantalising framework, supported by startling and erotic visualisations, focussing on the filmed male body (Luca Armstrong - 120 synchronised cameras employed), exploring digital reimagining. These hauntingly float on high – like sleeping angels - turning, blurring, alive, yet in love with death and its stillness. They embrace us with their distilled yet fractured beauty. Mike Daly (video artist) and Alexander Berlage (lighting designer) deliver this mesmerising imagery, ensuring music and visuals were imaginatively linked.
The set and costumes design by Elizabeth Gadsby and floral design by Lisa Cooper were both exquisitely refulgent and restrained, building on the idea of meditation and intensifying beauty. The image of the altar and the reflective pool seemed to support the idea of these erotically charged flowers (a la Mapplethorpe).
The tenor, Brenton Spiteri, sings across all five canticles. His clear high tenor displays stamina and active responsiveness to the poetry of each work, particularly outstanding in the dark wartime mood of Still Falls the Rain (Canticle III), matched in purity and intensity by the horn playing of Carla Blackpool. The internalised rage at the Nazi bombs falling on London makes this work’s potency about the terror war unleashes on civilians, intensely felt. This piece links to the haunting terror of the Turn of the Screw (1953) that was to follow. It was dedicated to the young Australian pianist and composer Noel Mewton-Wood who committed suicide in 1953 after the tragic death of his lover.
The First Canticle, written after the comedy, Albert Herring (1947), is full of ecstatic melismas, the words almost channelling the Song of Songs – though Britten subverts the poems ecstatic tribute to a loving god, by now celebrating the love of male for male. It was written in memory of the Reverend Dick Shepherd, a peace campaigner of the 1930s.
The singing and staging of the Journey of the Magi (Canticle IV) written after his anti-war opera, Owen Wingrave (1970), drew out its humour and droll disillusionment, with its reflections on the birth of Jesus and how the best laid plans of mice and men can be upset by miracles – all dimly remembered as the piece reflects sharply on the irrelevance of ageing masculinity. The baritone, Simon Lobelson was particularly effective. The substitution of a counter-tenor with mezzo-soprano did not upset the vocal balance.
The transforming beauty of Abraham and Isaac (Canticle II) was fully achieved by Spiteri and Emily Edmonds (mezzo-soprano), the duetting voices invoking the presence of a grim god who demands absolute loyalty unto death. In this case the murder of a child. The musical means are simple, but other worldly, divining an extraordinary vibration. The catharsis, when the child is saved, is overwhelmingly emotional. Spiteri was chilling in letting us see how far religious belief will allow horrible acts to be contemplated. This work was written between Billy Budd (1951) and Gloriana (1953). Its startling music was employed again by Britten in his War Requiem (1961).
Luke Styles’ response to the Britten forges its own trajectory, beginning with muttered aphorisms and jagged shards of sound, as though sculpting at a very hard rock (“Stirring”). Stylistically, his music opens out and becomes more expansive as the trajectory of the Canticles embeds a sound world fashioned on brevity and stark responsiveness.
In some sense his work seemed to echo the play that Britten himself made on John Dowland in his dissection, variation, and reassembly of one of Downlands songs - Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland (1950 /1976 for viola and string orchestra) - which displays an extraordinary mutability. As Chris Myers says, “hints of a tune through a musical fog”. Some of this stylistic trajectory informs Styles’ response. The mutability of his own music was on display, invoking effective patterning and reflection. His piece adds violin to the piano, horn, and harp that the Britten works require. His music invokes the poetry of the King James Bible, the New Testament, Keppler, Bryon and Shelley.
Soprano Jane Sheldon was stellar indeed in her assumption of Style’s response to Kepler when he wrote to a colleague on the discovery of a new star. Harp and piano intimated at a new world fulgent on imagined extra-terrestrial scapes. This is brave music that requires further listening.
The final Britten canticle, The Death of Saint Narcissus, is a work that instantiates both embodied and disembodied sensuality. Spiteri is framed in a vivid dress and responds to both the harp (Rowan Phemister) and Eliot's youthful words with a freedom that is hauntingly deranged and ecstatic: now a dancer before god “his flesh was in love with burning arrows”. The metamorphosis of the poem and its music is startlingly unleashed as boy becomes tree, becomes fish, becomes young girl. Written after Death in Venice (1973), the compression and ecstasy of this work echoes Canticle I but brings forth greater complexity as though a lifetime of creativity was assembled and fractured into a daring and delightful kaleidoscope, aphoristic but substantial.
Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriage Works, Sydney, November 7, 2022
Gar Jones
The. Canticles were written across Britten’s lifetime and respond deeply to their chosen poetry by:
- Francis Quarles: My beloved is mine (1947)
- Chester Miracle Plays: Abraham and Isaac (1952)
- Edith Sitwell: Still falls the rain (1954)
- T. S. Elliot: Journey of the Magi (1972) and The death of Saint Narcissus (1974)
There is a wonderful febrile quality to these works, theatrical yet meditative, light and darkness intermingled.
They are self-contained pieces that engender strong emotional impacts across their relatively short time frames. They explore ecstasy, love and duty, the horrors of war, the ordinariness of miracles and the fluidity of self. Their melismas are ardently beautiful, distilled, poetic, shining, humorous and cathartic.
Jack Symonds as music director and Imara Savage the director ensured they operated within a tantalising framework, supported by startling and erotic visualisations, focussing on the filmed male body (Luca Armstrong - 120 synchronised cameras employed), exploring digital reimagining. These hauntingly float on high – like sleeping angels - turning, blurring, alive, yet in love with death and its stillness. They embrace us with their distilled yet fractured beauty. Mike Daly (video artist) and Alexander Berlage (lighting designer) deliver this mesmerising imagery, ensuring music and visuals were imaginatively linked.
The set and costumes design by Elizabeth Gadsby and floral design by Lisa Cooper were both exquisitely refulgent and restrained, building on the idea of meditation and intensifying beauty. The image of the altar and the reflective pool seemed to support the idea of these erotically charged flowers (a la Mapplethorpe).
The tenor, Brenton Spiteri, sings across all five canticles. His clear high tenor displays stamina and active responsiveness to the poetry of each work, particularly outstanding in the dark wartime mood of Still Falls the Rain (Canticle III), matched in purity and intensity by the horn playing of Carla Blackpool. The internalised rage at the Nazi bombs falling on London makes this work’s potency about the terror war unleashes on civilians, intensely felt. This piece links to the haunting terror of the Turn of the Screw (1953) that was to follow. It was dedicated to the young Australian pianist and composer Noel Mewton-Wood who committed suicide in 1953 after the tragic death of his lover.
The First Canticle, written after the comedy, Albert Herring (1947), is full of ecstatic melismas, the words almost channelling the Song of Songs – though Britten subverts the poems ecstatic tribute to a loving god, by now celebrating the love of male for male. It was written in memory of the Reverend Dick Shepherd, a peace campaigner of the 1930s.
The singing and staging of the Journey of the Magi (Canticle IV) written after his anti-war opera, Owen Wingrave (1970), drew out its humour and droll disillusionment, with its reflections on the birth of Jesus and how the best laid plans of mice and men can be upset by miracles – all dimly remembered as the piece reflects sharply on the irrelevance of ageing masculinity. The baritone, Simon Lobelson was particularly effective. The substitution of a counter-tenor with mezzo-soprano did not upset the vocal balance.
The transforming beauty of Abraham and Isaac (Canticle II) was fully achieved by Spiteri and Emily Edmonds (mezzo-soprano), the duetting voices invoking the presence of a grim god who demands absolute loyalty unto death. In this case the murder of a child. The musical means are simple, but other worldly, divining an extraordinary vibration. The catharsis, when the child is saved, is overwhelmingly emotional. Spiteri was chilling in letting us see how far religious belief will allow horrible acts to be contemplated. This work was written between Billy Budd (1951) and Gloriana (1953). Its startling music was employed again by Britten in his War Requiem (1961).
Luke Styles’ response to the Britten forges its own trajectory, beginning with muttered aphorisms and jagged shards of sound, as though sculpting at a very hard rock (“Stirring”). Stylistically, his music opens out and becomes more expansive as the trajectory of the Canticles embeds a sound world fashioned on brevity and stark responsiveness.
In some sense his work seemed to echo the play that Britten himself made on John Dowland in his dissection, variation, and reassembly of one of Downlands songs - Lachrymae, reflections on a song of Dowland (1950 /1976 for viola and string orchestra) - which displays an extraordinary mutability. As Chris Myers says, “hints of a tune through a musical fog”. Some of this stylistic trajectory informs Styles’ response. The mutability of his own music was on display, invoking effective patterning and reflection. His piece adds violin to the piano, horn, and harp that the Britten works require. His music invokes the poetry of the King James Bible, the New Testament, Keppler, Bryon and Shelley.
Soprano Jane Sheldon was stellar indeed in her assumption of Style’s response to Kepler when he wrote to a colleague on the discovery of a new star. Harp and piano intimated at a new world fulgent on imagined extra-terrestrial scapes. This is brave music that requires further listening.
The final Britten canticle, The Death of Saint Narcissus, is a work that instantiates both embodied and disembodied sensuality. Spiteri is framed in a vivid dress and responds to both the harp (Rowan Phemister) and Eliot's youthful words with a freedom that is hauntingly deranged and ecstatic: now a dancer before god “his flesh was in love with burning arrows”. The metamorphosis of the poem and its music is startlingly unleashed as boy becomes tree, becomes fish, becomes young girl. Written after Death in Venice (1973), the compression and ecstasy of this work echoes Canticle I but brings forth greater complexity as though a lifetime of creativity was assembled and fractured into a daring and delightful kaleidoscope, aphoristic but substantial.
Sydney Chamber Opera, Carriage Works, Sydney, November 7, 2022
Gar Jones