Keble College Chapel and Fauré's Requiem. One constructed between 1873-1876 to be the conduit between life and death, the earthly and the eternal; and the other composed just over a decade afterwards between 1887-1890 with the aim of doing pretty much the same thing in musical format.
Keble College has one of the largest, highest, and most ornate Chapels in Oxford, thus is a perfect setting for concerts. Particularly this one; the headline piece for Fauré's famous ‘lullaby of death’ could not have had a better setting in Butterfield’s architecture, who “sought a new form of Gothic which would both convey eternal truths and would express the spirit of the age”. Apparently the variation of the patterns that adorn both the college and the chapel reflects “how we live our lives, with a solid foundation, growing gradually more complex as one reaches heavenward”.
This philosophical attitude to death is mirrored by Fauré in his Requiem. Longstanding church organists tend to have a grim but stoic relationship with death, seeing as a substantial part of their living is to accompany the burial services of heaps of humans. So it’s no wonder that Fauré wanted his version to have “a very human feeling of faith in eternal rest”. No dramatics of fire and brimstone - more melodic, soothing and accepting.
And who is better equipped to sing philosophically in times such as these, than the students, staff and alumni of the Choir of the London School of Economics?! This is their sixth concert at the chapel: the chorus master Andrew Campling is a graduate of Keble, and the organist Luke Mitchell had previously appeared at the Keble Early Music Festival as a concerto soloist (harpsichord) and director - plus he read music at Queen’s, Oxford. So familiar territory for everyone.
The choice of programme was cleverly assembled with two heaven and earth pieces composed about a century earlier to Fauré. First Hayden’s Insanae et vanea curae was a great warm up and setting of pre-death earthly issues: ‘Frantic and futile anxieties invade our minds; they often fill our hearts with madness, depriving them of hope’.
The following piece (Mozart’s Ave verum corpus) was warmer still, performed as beautifully as the story behind it: it was composed in the last year of Mozart’s life, and written for Anton Stoll, a village teacher and choirmaster at a church in Baden near Vienna. It simply asks Christ to ‘Be our consolation in the hour of death’. So there we go: we’ve made it to the hour of death itself, and all this served as an enjoyable appetiser for the masterpiece of the Requiem. A great lead up to the delivery of the morbid journey itself, on a platter by now very well heated.
The opening of the Introitus was almost like a door gradually opening until the lux perpetua boldly shines down from the organ loft onto a confident choir. There were wonderful solos from soprano Sienna Tan and baritone Angus Bruce-Gardyne, which blended perfectly into the aesthetic of the rest of the choir and organ thanks to Campling's unobtrusive direction. Sienna Tan handled the emotional and vocal gear changes behind Pie Jesu seemingly effortlessly - that kind of delivery never fails to impress me.
Then follows my most favourite part in the whole Requiem (and choral music generally), which is Agnus Dei, where another light filled door seems to open. The opening one had perpetual light, this one is marginally different, being the eternal variety: ‘Lux aeterna luceat eis, Domine cum sanctis tuis in aeternum, quia pius es’ (May eternal light shine upon them, Lord, with thy saints forever, for Thou art merciful). No disappointments there at all - the colours of Keble Chapel glowed even stronger during that section, reminding me once again that I might have chromesthesia.
The earthly sounds of Libera me lead by Angus Bruce-Gardyne (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Aneurin Barnard, when viewed from the back of the chapel) brought the audience back down into the deep tones of morte aeterna which, when delivered fearlessly, really takes the edge off the subject matter. Yes, there is fire and trembling and wrath, anger, calamity, and misery…but guess what: perpetual light shining again at the end!
This light did seem to come from the organ loft, as well as the stained glass windows. Luke Mitchell accompanied with the skill of an Olympian three-legged relay runner between the soloists and the choir. He also made the In Paradisum not sound too saccharine, which can be the fate of that last section of the Requiem in possibly my opinion only.
On the way out of the concert, I overheard a woman who knows her onions mention that few performances can maintain their strength throughout - and that one really did.
All in all, it was a lovely sunny late evening spent listening to morbid subject material whilst surrounded by Victorian colour, and the overall experience of all of that was extremely beautiful and comforting. Which is what I think both Andrew Campling and Gabriel Fauré intended.