Requiem Eternal Light treads new ground

Mar 26 2009 By Christopher Morley

Verdi is a hard act to follow, composer Howard Goodall tells Christopher Morley.

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Little over a week since Birmingham heard two great requiems, Verdi and the Britten War Requiem, the city is set to hear a much more recent example.

The Requiem Eternal Light has been composed by Howard Goodall, a popular television and radio presenter as well as being a prolific composer whose film and television credits alone run into dozens.

Eternal Light will be performed at Birmingham Hippodrome from Wednesday onwards as part of a three-ballet programme presented by the Rambert Dance Company, with the music delivered by the Ex Cathedra Academy of Vocal Music and Rambert’s associate orchestra, London Musici.

When we spoke recently, I began by asking Howard about the role models which loom over any new requiem.

“I suppose you could say role models, or you could say it’s a bit daunting, because the requiems that are out there in the repertoire, some of them are even more substantial – like the Verdi Requiem, which is an enormous piece, and some of them are very, very well-loved, in fact most of the famous requiems are: the Mozart, the Faure, and so on.

“I thought there’s no point in retreading old territory, I’ve just got to do my own thing here. I think there’s a huge amount of music out there, and if you as a professional composer worried about not matching up to everybody else’s music, you’d never write anything.

“One of the things I did know was that this was going to be a slightly different kind of requiem because, although it is for choir and orchestra, like all those other ones, I knew from day one that it was going to be danced.

“So the conversations I had, very, very early on, before a note was written, with the choreographer and the designer of the stage show were very important to the way I thought about how the piece was going to develop, and for all of us we thought the meeting-point between the sound, the music I was writing, and the pictures, as it were, of dancers, was going to be this idea of light, a sort of incandescent, bright light, and both in the music and in the dance we were going to try to attempt something which was looking at the soul in flight, if you like.

“And obviously that started to make me think of a kind of music that hopefully would have enough in it to be able to make a dance work out of it, with different movements, and a slightly different attitude in each movement, and that also would stand on its own as a piece of choral music.”

We end in the light of “Lux Aeterna”, with a gentle and gracious waltz-rhythm, which reminds me somewhat of Howard’s setting of Psalm 23, The Lord is my Shepherd, the title-music to the wonderful Vicar of Dibley BBC television series.

“Ah! Well, the weird thing about being a composer is that you can hear other people’s style in their music, but you can’t hear it in your own. And I certainly can’t!

“If someone played me an imitation of my music, I don’t know if I would recognise the style. In the way that when very, very fine impersonators do an impersonation of somebody, everybody else thinks, that’s a brilliant impersonation, just like the person, but the person themself can’t see it.

“In fact Rory Bremner once did me, and I couldn’t recognise myself in it – we even look quite alike”. Which indeed they do.

Ballet composition has been on quite a high profile with contemporary composers in recent years. One thinks of John McCabe, Peter Maxwell Davies, the late Paul Reade: and now Howard Goodall has joined them.

“Yes, of course ‘ballet’ is a catch-all phrase, and in fact what we’re all really doing is working with contemporary dance. One of the things that I found so delightful about doing this project, and I’ve enjoyed every aspect of it, the collaboration with the creative team, and then with the dancers, who I found a bit scary to start with, to be honest – they were all so small and so fit! I felt like Gulliver in Lilliput, when I went into rehearsals, clumping about, but I got to like them a great deal, and saw their very different approach to something coming through.

“I enjoyed that a great deal, I enjoyed the performances, and the fact that it’s something different every night, and the fact that there’s a different choir singing it wherever it goes, means that it keeps re-inventing itself, and I actually have loved that aspect of it. I suppose that composers in my world are used to recording something and, sort of, that’s it! That’s hopefully the perfect version, whether it’s for a film score or a TV theme, or a piece of choral music that’s going to be on a CD...

“But this is endlessly being reinvented by the dancers, and the other thing about it that I love so much was, the minute it started to play to audiences, I realised that the average age of audience members for Rambert Dance Company on tour is quite a bit lower than the average age that you would expect to find, for example, in a concert hall for a classical music concert.

“And the youth of the audience, and the youthful expectation of the audience, whatever their age, when they come to contemporary dance is something I’ve enjoyed a great deal. ”

* Eternal Light is at Birmingham Hippodrome from April 1-4 (7.30pm, details on 0844 338 5000).