It’s 60 years since the consecration of the new Coventry Cathedral, built alongside the ruins of the medieval one that was destroyed by bombing in 1940. The opening of the building was marked by a number of significant music commissions, including Arthur Bliss’s Beatitudes, Michael Tippett’s opera King Priam, and, most famously, Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem. And it’s Britten’s work that provides the starting point for Nitin Sawhney’s Ghosts in the Ruins, commissioned as part of Coventry’s year as UK city of culture to mark the anniversary.
Promised as a site-specific work reflecting present-day Coventry’s role as a “city of sanctuary”, it proved to be disappointingly bland. The first part of the 75-minute work is performed in the new cathedral, the second among the atmospheric ruins of the old, yet it never manages to articulate the dialogue between past and present and war and peace that I suspect is intended, and much of the work has the inert feeling of a dutiful school concert.
