Always uncompromising in his programming, Vladimir Jurowski’s latest concert with the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Choir juxtaposed Haydn’s Missa in Tempore Belli (Mass in Time of War) with John Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls, both works written in response to crises at turning points in history. Haydn’s Mass dates from 1796 as the French revolutionary wars began to swing against the Habsburg empire. Transmigration was commissioned as a tribute to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the New York Philharmonic, who gave the premiere in 2002.
Adams refused to label the work a memorial or requiem, describing it as “a ‘memory space’… a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”. The text assembles a documentary collage of phrases from missing-person notices and flyers posted in lower Manhattan, lists of victims’ names, a repeated quote (“I see water and buildings”) from a flight attendant on American Airlines flight 11. A sustained elegy for orchestra, choir, and children’s chorus (the Tiffin Youth Choir here) unfolds against prerecorded tapes of street sounds, sirens and a voice, first a child’s then a man’s, tonelessly repeating the word “missing”. This is slow, at times unvarying music, but acrid dissonances gradually pile up during its course, reaching a wrenching climax before the exhausted, resigned close. It was all superbly controlled by Jurowski, and played and sung with sustained, fervent intensity.
