At the end of a study day devoted to music, poetry and the trauma of war, the London Symphony Orchestra’s concert with Gianandrea Noseda included the first performance of a work that dealt in musical and poetic terms with the lasting psychological effects of war. Co-commissioned by the LSO, Sally Beamish’s Equal Voices is a large-scale setting with soloists and chorus of An Equal Voice, which Andrew Motion wrote for Remembrance Day in 2009. His poem is constructed using first-person accounts of shell-shock (what now is usually called post-traumatic stress disorder) from first world war victims, and Beamish intersperses these stanzas with extracts from the Old Testament Song of Songs, contrasting the horrors of war with the redemptive possibilities of love.
It’s a thoughtful, lucid scheme, given musical coherence by a series of chorales that articulate the 50-minute structure, with two soloists, soprano Shuna Scott Sendall and baritone Marcus Farnsworth, underlining the work’s duality. Britten’s War Requiem inevitably lurks in the background, especially in the baritone’s solos, in which terrifying wartime experiences are revisited. But Beamish mostly sidesteps such comparisons, though her choral writing (presented with pungent immediacy by the London Symphony Chorus) tends to be more striking than the solo passages, and the balance between voices and orchestra (tuned percussion especially) wasn’t always ideal in the hall – the Radio 3 broadcast seems to have got things in better perspective.
Noseda had begun the concert with an impassioned account of a now almost forgotten piece by Elgar from 1914, the melodrama Carillon, in which a patriotic poem by the Belgian Émile Cammaerts is spoken (by the excellent Malcolm Sinclair here) over a surging, orchestral theme. Then for something utterly, exhilaratingly different came Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto, played with such astonishing freshness, clarity and unfussy poetry by Nelson Freire, that it seemed as if he and we in the audience were discovering it all over again.
• On BBC iPlayer until 1 December.
