MacMillan and Osborne at the City of London Festival - 16.07.09

[Concert Review] The Telegraph Osborne Premiere, City of London Festival, review Nigel Osborne’s Seven Words, Seven Icons, Seven Cities provided intimacy and beautifully crafted understatement. By Ivan Hewett

Everything came in sevens at the choir-and-strings concert at St Andrew’s Church in Holborn: Seven Last Words from the Cross from James Macmillan, and a new piece from British composer Nigel Osborne entitled Seven Words, Seven Icons, Seven Cities. This was a celebration of seven cities lying on or near the 60th parallel (it should have been 49th, surely, but never mind).

Each movement offered a very fragmentary text (sung by Tenebrae) in obscure languages, plus projected images of misty landscapes, plus a suggested “icon” to meditate on. We had Nuclear Reactors, Passing Aircraft, Northern Lights, Ancient Myth, unpronounceable names referring to who knows what.

There was enough material for a 90-minute oratorio. What we got was a delicately suggestive 23-minute set of miniatures. Wispy textures in the strings (the excellent Scottish Ensemble) suggestive of northern mist gave way to choral stanzas of an archaic modal hue. The contrast between the clanking symbolic apparatus and the slenderness of the music was bizarre, but I enjoyed the music’s intimacy and beautifully crafted understatement.

Intimacy and understatement can be virtues of MacMillan’s music. But in Seven Last Words from the Cross his symbolic intentions are written in letters seven feet high. We heard splintered, “brutal” string chords, “keening” figures, long choral movements that started dolefully and rose heavenwards, or vice versa. In contrast, there was one marvellous passage in the sixth movement when the harmony edged upwards by semitonal degrees, in a way that echoed Wagner’s power without mimicking his language. For a moment, a real musical idea emerged.

In this company, Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet seemed more than ever a true masterpiece. Like everything else in the concert, it was performed with tremendous intensity and care for detail. All praise especially to cellist Alison Lawrance for the quiet gravity of her solos.

[Concert Review] The Times Scottish Ensemble/Tenebrae at St Andrew’s, London EC4 Neil Fisher

When the City of London Festival wanted a composer to mark all their chosen seven cities on the latitude of 60 degrees north (one of this year’s more whimsical themes, not least when you start to think about the gulf between Kirkwall, Orkney Islands and St Petersburg, Russia), there was one obvious choice. Nigel Osborne, whose last big commission for the festival explored the legacy of the Bosnian war, is a passionate European (and polyglot) whose work and studies have taken him across the continent.

Thankfully, his brief but effective Seven words, seven icons, seven cities doesn’t try to paint individual postcards so much as string these chilly destinations together in one cool chapter. Fragments from national texts, from Gaelic to Estonian, Finnish to Russian, are mixed up with their English translations and sung with a rapt plangency by the voices of Tenebrae. As with many of Osborne’s other works, the tension — more obviously expressed in the quivering accompaniment from the string players of the Scottish Ensemble — is tradition versus modernity. The “icons” in question are mostly those of contemporary technology — radio frequencies for Oslo, a ship’s engine for Kirkwall — which feed into the spikier textures of the music, as well as the sombre, striking videos produced by Cathie Boyd and Angelica Kroeger to partner the piece.

Seven words was also commissioned as a companion for the evening’s main event, James MacMillan’s Seven Last Words from the Cross. It’s a brave, unflinching piece, which won its composer the 1995 Mercury Music Prize, and it was given a brave, unflinching performance. Whether it really manages to turn religious contemplation into musical transcendence may depend on a listener’s spiritual commitment, however. Here, it seemed overlong and rather underinflected, its seven, agonised sections not so much building to a climax as simply piling on the agony, and the rather saccharine video art designed for this performance (by Boyd and James Houston) didn’t fill the gap.

Good for the Scottish Ensemble, then, that they were also able to flex their considerable muscle in Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony — an arrangement of the composer’s moving String Quartet No 8 — which was delivered with tragic, taut finality.