Cheltenham Festival 2013: Finale (Concert Review - The Guardian, 2013)
Providing companion pieces to some of Benjamin Britten's core works has been the challenge for many composers during this centenary year. Michael Zev Gordon was no exception: the daunting nature of the task in hand for him was underlined by a fine performance of Britten's Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, featuring tenor Toby Spence with Richard Watkins's matchless horn solos, in the first half of this final night of the Cheltenham festival.
Yet the urgent opening of Gordon's The Gleam of Hidden Skies was an indication of an almost fevered inspiration immediately set in train. Taking its title from Isaac Rosenberg's Have We Sailed…, Gordon's sequence of five poems by Byron, Larkin, Blake, Rosenberg and Cummings was astutely chosen: there were perceptible resonances with Britten's settings, yet the outburst of high drama that Blake's A Poison Tree offered Gordon at the very heart of the cycle had its own stark inevitability. With voice and horn more often in counterpoint each with the other than in Britten's alternating pattern, textures were often more dense, but Gordon's word-setting was always sensitive and embraced both Spence's lyrical warmth and Watkins's instinctive expressivity. The cycle's overall concern with life's progressions back and forth from dark to light reached its ultimate climax in Cummings's You Are Tired, where the image of floating, translucent moon meeting sea is reflected in a dream-like soundscape.
In the festival programme's biographies, Gordon described his music as "always in search of serenity". He seemed to have found it here. Stephen Layton's handling of the City of London Sinfonia strings in these and in Vaughan Williams's Tallis Fantasia was unflappable.
Reviewed by Rian Evans
The Guardian