Francis Pott’s oratorio A Song on the End of World takes its title from the Nobel prize in literature laureate Czesław Miłosz’s poem written after the Nazi invasion of his native Poland. The oratorio, a Three Choirs commission, was first performed in 1999, its reappearance at this year’s festival comes in the wake of it being voted, during 2020’s lockdown, festival audience’s favourite premiere. Twenty-four years on, neither its subject matter nor its musical style feels any the less contemporary or relevant.
In his seven-movement structure, Pott sets texts including Walt Whitman, George Mackay Brown, Randall Jarrell and Charles Causley, as well as psalms and anonymous 15th-century words which, while reflecting on the humanity of Christ, also suggest Christ as Everyman in a world where every continuing atrocity is a crucifixion repeated. The work’s emphasis on the pity of war makes it feels like a requiem, against the rosy hue of the Miłosz poem and its insistence that “No one believes it is happening now”.
