Gloucester Choral Society’s Concert for Peace unfortunately turned out to be more timely than intended. It matched a rarely heard work with one that has been extremely popular in recent years.
I looked for recent performances of Donald Swann’s Requiem for the Living, and found evidence of just one, given by a community choir in Scotland – as it happens, conducted by a friend of mine! Cecil Day Lewis hoped that Britten would set his words, but after Britten went for Wilfrid Owen instead, Swann took on the job. The poems allude to the movements of the Requiem Mass, but are agnostic and humanist in tone, written when the threat of nuclear war seemed very real; some are spoken over the music rather than set. Not many choral works mention whippets! The accompaniment is a chamber ensemble including a cimbalom.
People in the choir who sang in our performance found that it grew on them. A few entries took up a significant part of our rehearsal time, and I wondered whether the reason was that while Swann was very good at writing solo songs (we all know this), he was less experienced at composing for 4-part choir, resulting in some leads which were unhelpful to the singers.
One reason for choosing this piece was the centenary of Donald Swann’s birth, and his widow came to Gloucester to hear the performance. I’ll now go back to singing ‘Misalliance’ (another plea for living in tolerance and peace) at the bindweed in the garden.
The second half of the programme was Karl Jenkins’ Armed Man Mass. I had sung part of this before, and didn’t have much difficulty learning the rest. I’m not going to go far out of my way to sing this, but I’m happy to do it once in a while.