Elgar’s much-loved Serenade for Strings was given its unofficial 1892 premiere by the amateurs of the Worcester Ladies’ Orchestral Class. The perfect piece of salon Victoriana, it was an ideal more-tea-vicar, bone-china-and-bread-and-butter scene-setter for the cataclysmic eruptions of Mark Simpson’s The Immortal.
Inspired by Victorian occultism, Simpson’s 2015 oratorio invites its audience to a Victorian seance. Texts collated by Melanie Challenger represent the scattered anxieties, pleas and nonsense of the automatic writing produced by mediums of the time. Against these are set the words of Frederic Myers: founder of the Society for Psychical Research, obsessed with the afterlife since the suicide of his childhood sweetheart.
Nineteenth-century mediums could only deploy concealed wires and the odd bit of ectoplasm for atmosphere; Simpson has a whole orchestra – complete with harp and a battery of percussion – choir and solo baritone at his disposal. The texture has actually been thinned down since the premiere a decade ago, but this is still a work of impossibly dense, deliberately impenetrable, apocalyptic textures. You watch bows moving, wind breathing, but cannot identify their sounds in the mix.
Conductor Daniela Candillari (making her RLPO debut) kept all controlled, but between the amplified howls and shrieks of the vocalists of Exaudi and excellent soloist Rory Musgrave (also amplified, unnecessarily) it was hard to find much to grasp hold of in a piece that’s a sequence of self-contained episodes that neither develop nor narrate.
The opening Elgar was intimate to a fault – gentle, dainty – even that nagging little viola rhythm more bumblebee than wasp. It made sense in context, but when the same moderation smoothed the craggy Finnish fells of Sibelius’s Second Symphony into the rolling Malvern Hills, giving us a climactic payoff but no real buildup to it from the good-natured, pastoral beginning, it was more of an issue. There was a lovely translucent quality to the Allegretto, glacier-clear through the first half, but the ominous timpani rumble that launches the second movement brought no clouding-over, the scherzo plenty of speed but no real tension. This was a concert that promised life and death but left us hovering earth-bound in between.
