In 2016 the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra introduced to the UK one of the finest orchestral scores of the 21st century to date, John Luther Adams’ Become Ocean. Ludovic Morlot, who had commissioned the work for the Seattle Symphony Orchestra, conducted the Birmingham premiere too, and he was again on the podium for the first performance here of the new piece the CBSO co-commissioned, Vespers of the Blessed Earth.
Adams’ music has regularly celebrated the wonders and beauties of the natural world, whether in Alaska, where he used to live, or in the deserts of Mexico, where he now spends much of his time. But the tone of the five pieces, three of them choral, that make up these Vespers is distinctly elegiac. “I wanted to give full voice to the grief so many of us feel today,” he says, “to seek a measure of consolation and solace, and some hope in the enduring beauty of the Earth.”
That “full voice” centres on the fourth movement, Litanies of the Sixth Extinction. There the choir (the excellent CBSO Chorus and the University of Birmingham Voices) divides into four groups to intone the scientific names of 193 critically threatened or recently extinct species of animals and plants; all end their lists with “Homo sapiens”, while a bell tolls and wind instruments arrayed around the auditorium add wispy decoration.
In the opening movement, A Brief Descent Into Deep Time, there’s another list, of the minerals and colours of the strata of the Grand Canyon, delivered by the choir in overlapping descending scales, while in the second, their voices are wordless, singing the song of a fruit dove that in Papua New Guinea is associated with mourning. The central movement is a chaconne for the strings alone, and another bird song, of a Hawaiian bird that became extinct in the 1980s, forms the basis of the finale, sung by a wordless solo soprano (the velvety smooth Katie Trethewey), until that voice too stutters into silence in the woodwind.
It’s all very beautiful, but without ever quite cohering into a single statement, whether angry or regretful. Only when Morlot followed the premiere with a fiercely assertive performance of Sibelius’s Second Symphony did the submerged emotions of the Vespers suddenly seem to gain a voice.
