Adelaide Festival. Adelaide Town Hall. 5 Mar 2015
Festival composer-in-residence and conductor Gavin Bryars was enthusiastically applauded at the conclusion of his curiously–titled composition Jesus’ Blood Never failed Me Yet. Written in 1971, it is his arrangement of a simple hymn by an unknown composer. Near-chance events led Bryars to acquiring a taped recording of an old man singing a stanza from a hymn in shaky-voice. Bryars turned this into a continuous loop and gradually overlaid it with a string and brass accompaniment.
From the Adelaide Town Hall podium, Bryars explains to the substantial audience that he found the old man’s voice deeply affecting and wanted to enhance it, and he certainly does.
Waiting for Bryar’s to beat in the orchestra, we sit in silence. Then, almost imperceptibly, we hear the faintest strains of a voice – seemingly from offstage. Initially we think it is bad stage management – someone idly humming from backstage who needs to be silenced quickly before the performance can begin – but it is anything but. It is in fact the forty-year old recording of the old man singing the hymn. The volume gradually increases and Bryars brings in the orchestra. Just a few violins at first, trying to fit in with the loose meter of the untrained voice. They settle in and almost in the fashion of Ravel’s Bolero, Bryars gradually enriches the soundscape adding additional strings, and then brass. The volume swells and fades as instruments enter and leave, and all the time the strangely affecting vocals of the old man ride gently above the waves of Bryar’s superlative orchestration.
It is long. The performance includes more than a hundred repetitions of the thirteen-bar stanza stretching over forty minutes: “Jesus’ blood never failed me yet, never failed me yet. Jesus’ blood never failed me yet. There’s one thing I know, for he loves me so. Jesus’ blood never failed me yet.” The repetition becomes hypnotic, and annoying, and one’s attention moves backwards and forwards between the solo voice and the music. We hopelessly wait for a variation in the vocals that we know will never eventuate. One’s mind earnestly seeks to find a pattern in the orchestration. What is its structure? Why aren’t the musicians turning the pages of their score? Is it really repetitive like the vocal line - it doesn’t sound like it is?
It is frustrating, it is soothing. It is transcendent. It is a testimony to the spirit of man.
Although Jesus’ Blood Never failed Me Yet is the main-stay, the programme also includes other gems in the first half. Howard Skempton’s Lento is a superb example of modern serious orchestral music that takes minimalism an extra step. It concentrates on pure melody and almost abandons attempts at development. The sound washes over you and lifts you to an entirely different place. It is both uplifting and melancholic.
Bryar’s The Porazzi Fragment (which is based on a musical idea of Wagner) is also almost despondent but the gentle insertion of filigree-like violin lines engender a serene restfulness. Arvo Pärt’s If Bach Had Been A Beekeeper injected a sense of pace and inevitably moving forward, and it swept us into two arias from Bryar’s opera G.
Soprano Anna Fraser’s performance of Ennelina’s Aria is imposing. With an almost imperceptible vibrato, her voice rises over the orchestra in a display of tonal clarity.
As impressive an experience as Jesus’ Blood Never failed Me Yet is, the highlight of the evening is bass, Alex Knight singing the Epilogue from G. This young man, an Australian, has a booming voice and a stellar international career is surely in front of him. His strength and evenness of tone across the register must be the envy of basses everywhere, and all from someone who is in the very early stages of his career. At times the score take him into the tenor range and he handles that with aplomb as well. Bravo. We need to hear much more from you!
Festival Director David Sefton has pulled one out of the bag with this concert. It is such a shame it is a ‘once only’.
Kym Clayton
When: Closed
Where: Adelaide Town Hall
Bookings: Closed
