Monday evening's Three Choirs Festival programme was firmly set in the Great War, beginning with the Fifth Symphony Sibelius completed in 1915, but whose 1919 revision is the version we invariably here today.
This is a great piece, cogent, brimming with memorable melodies, stirring and affirmative, but something in this expertly-delivered performance from the hardworking Philharmonia Orchestra seemed missing. Certainly the playing was controlled and colourful, though the acoustic and cramped staging meant conductor Andrew Davis' careful signalling of doublebass detail in the finale had an inaudible response.
And for all Davis' fluent grasp of the score, with transitions well-achieved, perhaps there could have been more sense of nature's gradual awakening as Sibelius' hard-grafted structure progressed.
Perhaps we know this symphony too well. Certainly the rarity which is Morning Heroes, described by the composer Arthur Bliss in his 1930 score as "a symphony for orator, chorus and orchestra" certainly held its own in terms of performance, imposing its own interpretation.
This hour-long work, a tribute to those fallen in the Great War (including Bliss' own brother), draws upon various texts, from Homer to Wilfred Owen, though its inclusion of a Walt Whitman poem outraged at an assault upon Manhattan does raise the question of bathos, despite its pertinent sentiments.
The orchestral writing is deft and expressive (many resonances of Elgar, not least of his own wartime works, both for chorus and for orator), but the choral writing is frequently cluttered. Full marks to the Festival Chorus, devotedly trained by their respective cathedral organists, for fearless projection, exemplary diction, and brave attempts at the composer's sometimes optimistic dynamics.
Full marks, too, to the Philharmonia, fully on top of a score probably unknown to them, assiduously following Davis' batonless beat.
But more than full marks to Malcolm Sinclair, a late stand-in for Samuel West, declaiming both Homer and Wilfred Owen in sad, authoritative tones which brooked no question that war brings devastation both at home as well as to those destroyed on the fighting front.
