Epoch has gathered five pieces by British composers written in response to the Great War. There is no chest-thumping nationalism evident here, but deeply sad portraits of the devastation of war. The centerpiece is
Elgar's three-movement cantata, The Spirit of England, for soprano, tenor, chorus, and orchestra, based on freshly written poetry by Laurence Binyon. The subject matter and the poetry inspired a passion in
Elgar that's not always apparent in his music and they give this piece an irresistible urgency. The cantata stands as a worthy precursor to
Britten's War Requiem.
Three of the works have special poignancy because they are valedictory, coming at the end of brief musical careers cut short before they had had a chance to blossom, by death in battle as in the case of F.S. Kelly, mental illness in the case of Ivor Gurney, or a settling into the domesticity expected of women at the time, as in the case of Lilian Elkington. Kelly's Elegy for strings, a memorial to poet Rupert Brooke, another casualty of the war, is especially moving: a tender and atmospheric evocation of the landscape of the Greek island on which Brooke was buried. Gurney's wrenching War Elegy was written soon after the composer's military service, just before the point at which he was committed to an asylum. Out of the Mist, an impressionistic but monumental tone poem by Lilian Elkington, who gave up composition when she married, is a powerful depiction of her experience of watching a warship appear through the fog of Dover, bringing home the English dead.
The BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus, under
David Lloyd-Jones, play and sing with passion and tenderness, but soprano
Susan Gritton and tenor
Andrew Kennedy, soloists in the
Elgar, have the vocal tightness that can be characteristic of English oratorio soloists. The performances of the other works are fully satisfying musically, and all of the pieces are sobering reminders of the costs of war.