When Vladimir Jurowski planned this typically unorthodox programme, he could not have known that a disaster even greater, long-term, than 9/11 was going to befall the USA two days after the concert. There is no bad time for a tricky commemoration of the World Trade Center attacks, but close to a presidential inauguration would have been right whatever the outcome. As for an 18th century “Mass in Time of War”, clearly Ukraine and Gaza would still be on the agenda.
Come the event, and neither of the main works on the programme quite stirred the soul: absolutely no fault of Jurowski’s meticulous preparation and the incisive work of four superb soloists, two hard-working choirs and the London Philharmonic Orchestra attentive, as ever under this conductor, to every detail.
Adams’ On the Transmigration of Souls remains fascinating, honourable but perhaps infirm of purpose; Haydn’s masses always adapt to a formula with plenty of originality, but show less of his ingenuity than the symphonies created in the experimental laboratory of the Esterhazy Court Orchestra (though they’re far more interesting than the curiously mundane operas, one of which was being performed by the students of the Royal Irish Academy of Music on the same day). In the Missa in tempore belli, Jurowski simply made the direct flow of cheerful and melancholy, major and minor, roll along in even-tempered fashion, with the continuity between mass movements making us forget that they would originally have punctuated a service at various distances from each other.
Like a symphonic movement, the opening Kyrie has a slow introduction with clouds dispersed by a bright and breezy Allegro, the superb Anna Devin (pictured right by Victoria Cadish) leading the festivities. Bass Trevor Eliot Bowes had the longest solo, elaborated with Haydn’s usual sensitivity by solo cello and bassoons; although the flute merely rides the line, Jurowski brought Juliette Bausor closer to voice and cello to ensure she was singing from the same hymn sheet. The vocal quartet, completed by the resonant inner lines of Hanna Hipp and Rupert Charlesworth, gilded the lily of Haydn’s lyrical flow, complemented by the clear delivery of the London Philharmonic Choir. Period kettle drums for the not too threatening advance of war into the Agnus Dei and valveless horns added to the crispness of the approach.
Of the larger forces onstage at the beginning of the second half, there was a big complement involved in György Kurtág’s “Little Solemn Music” for Boulez’s 90th birthday – more appropriate for the centenary of the now-deceased Frenchman, as it already sounds like a “tombeau" or funeral piece. The contrasting sonorities were the thing here, impeccably balanced like everything else, though perhaps quickly forgotten. As for the “mixing board” technique Adams writes about in the best contemporary composer’s autobiography, Hallelujah Junction, as coming from Ives – there’s an Unanswered Question trumpet some way in to On the Transmigration of Souls, we have misplaced expectations that it will develop, fly through space, like the early choral masterpiece Harmonium or the orchestral accumulations of Harmonielehre.
What happens instead is still puzzling. Is this memorial, or part-re-enactment of horrors? Did Adams start out with the cinematic soundscape to accompany sounds of New York and change tack? The melodic phrases with which the children’s choir articulates lines written or spoken at the time of the horror promise much. But then we get a more conventional build-up, an explosion, which seems to betray first intentions. Far from being “deeply moving,” as the programme note promises, there’s something else going on here.
Too insistent at times to be a "memory space", it still doesn't scour the soul. Adams has been honest enough to say that he wondered if the whole thing was “compromised and uneven”, then a performance in Atlanta changed his mind. I wonder what he’d think of this dedicated presentation, with perfect soundscape by Jonathan Green surrounding us in the stalls. My own mind’s still not made up. One final quibble: the LPO pleads budgetary restraints in not providing a photographer for the occasion; fair enough for many of its season's concerts, but not for this one, where the choirs especially need to be honoured in images.
