For better or worse, an adjective rarely appropriate for concerts is ‘brave’, but this was emphatically the case throughout Britten Sinfonia’s Palm Sunday concert at Birmingham Town Hall. Sobriety and sombre hues were the dress code and colour scheme for a sequence of works exploring a depth and intensity of pain that can only be described as abject. Alongside the players were the 24 singers of Britten Sinfonia Voices, a group founded in 2011 comprising a mix of established and emergent vocal talent. For voices and players alike, that talent was seriously tested in a programme staring unflinchingly into the void.
Byrd’s motet Miserere mei, Deus went some way to establish the tone. Its harmonic richness prevents the music from entirely living up to the penitential urgency of the text, although an avoidance of cadential finality keeps the music from settling, and the singers demonstrated lovely control over its tense, undulating contours. It was the first of many occasions when conductor Eamonn Dougan would demonstrate a remarkable knack for finding the perfect balance between allowing the emotion time to speak while keeping everything moving. The beauty and power of Bach’s music depends on it being lifted out of being merely the aural equivalent of a period drama. It, too, benefited from a brisk, bright approach that afforded both words – a rare instance of optimistic hope in the concert – and music the freshness of a lemon-scented towel.
Having ambled thus far at the edge of the abyss, our communal plunge into it now began. Conductor and singers left the stage for Rudolf Barshai’s famous transcription for string orchestra of Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet. Reborn as a Chamber Symphony, it highlights even more emphatically the weird, troubling drama of a work written when its composer was fully intending to commit suicide. The myriad quotations from Shostakovich’s earlier works send mixed signals: a final revisiting of cherished creations, or a self-loathing act of blunt ridicule (parody, after all, being second nature to Shostakovich)? Either way, there was the profound sense of a composer in the confessional, articulated with an authentic sense of discomfort by Britten Sinfonia. In a work that offers essentially nothing resembling a respite, the players brought a lightness of delivery through the faster movements that for a time kept at bay the dread at its core. But only for a time; through a concluding pair of Largo movements, Shostakovich places his pulse into ever more quicksand, where everything – even a fugue – becomes increasingly concentrated and claustrophobic. As the music came full circle, the players managed to make returning ideas the antithesis of a recapitulation; we were back where we started, stupefied and numb, and the way they lingered upon the work’s agonized final cadence – music that almost cannot bear to end – was horribly effective and very moving indeed.