British composer Francis Pott's oratorio The Cloud of Unknowing was premiered in highly emotional circumstances on 13 May 2006. The piece is a vivid plea for peace in a world torn apart by violence, the inscription in the score reading: 'To the memory of Margaret Hassan and all innocent lives lost in Iraq or beyond'. Consequently, when the work was first performed at St Pancras' Church, only feet away from the 7 July bus explosion of the previous year, it captured the mourning of many of those present who still had to come to terms with the damage that surrounded them.
The oratorio was commissioned by the superlative Vasari Singers, who return to St John's Smith Square on 16 June 2007 for an eclectic programme of Bach and James Macmillan (amongst others). The choir celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2005 by commissioning ten new works, of which this was one.
But what started out as an extended anthem of perhaps twenty minutes turned into a ninety-minute cantata for tenor, choir and organ.
Pott throws everything at it in terms of texts, combining parts of the Bible with verses by war poets. There are interesting juxtapositions of meaning and themes, portraying internal and external troubles of the spirit and soul. In particular, lines from poems by people like René Arcos (a French poet of the First World War) - artists who experienced the destruction of life in different but no less harrowing circumstances than those who witnessed the 7 July attack - inject the piece with poignancy.
But whereas this combination of secular and religious texts worked so well for Britten in his War Requiem, it does not always convince me in Pott's case. On his website, he highlights his juxtaposition of 'the taboo words from Psalm 137 which extol the dashing of infant brains against the stones (thereby calling children to atone for the enmity of their parents)' with the pastoral calm of Psalm 23. I feel slightly uncomfortable about this manipulation of the texts for dramatic purposes. And I feel the interpretation of the words is forced and misleading. Psalm 137 is a lament over the destruction of Jerusalem, illustrating the frustration of the exiled Jews and their understandable feelings of vengeance against the Babylonians who have enslaved them (which is a scenario familiar from Verdi's Nabucco, reviewed last week). To extract from the Psalm the line 'blessed shall he be that taketh their children and dasheth them against the stones' gives a false impression of what the text is really about: surely the Jews mean that they have to conquer future generations of Babylonians to regain their country, but here it feels that Pott is saying that the Bible condones the destruction of children. Although I fully admit it is a personal reaction, I feel this is an inflammatory message to be giving out about Christianity - and by extension, no more commendable or responsible than the Islamic extremism that Pott condemns.
Musically, too, the work is sprawling and difficult to get to grips with (and I may not be alone in this). Indeed, I felt aural indigestion within minutes of the start, largely because Pott's compositional procedures are so limited. Too often, the whole choir is singing as loudly as possible, with the voices spread out to extremes; the organ repeatedly plays dense diminished chords in banal rhythms, apparently in an attempt to conjure up Armageddon but to little emotional effect on me; every so often, the tenor soloist pops up to sing a melancholy verse very quietly, but the word-setting is uninspired and the vocal line formless and forgettable; and in general, there is such monotony about the whole affair that one wonders why the piece was ever extended to such a size. I was particularly surprised by the poverty of the organ writing, given that Pott is a trained organist and pianist (though the two instruments require very different talents). Sometimes we find him composing a single melodic line for the organ with no accompaniment and to little effect; at other points, the organist seems just to attack the instrument without discernment or purpose, drawing dense clusters of sound but no music. I understand why others might enjoy the fullness of the choral sound or the relevance of the libretto, but I'm afraid I found it all terribly worthy but uninspiring.
The saving grace of the CD is that the performances are all as terrific as one has come to expect from the Vasari Singers and their collaborators. Jeremy Backhouse battles valiantly with the size of the piece, channelling the massive forces in the right direction, while James Gilchrist is a committed and lyrical tenor soloist. Jeremy Filsell also works extremely hard at the organ, but with such material he was fighting a losing battle. The choir itself gives a superlative performance, evoking the best of the English oratorio tradition in their vigorous and uplifting singing.
Heaven forbid that I should go down in history for condemning a piece of music that will be hailed as a masterpiece in the future. But after listening to The Cloud of Unknowing three times now, I can only say that its effectiveness eludes me.