Among 20th century English composers, Rutland Boughton was once much more widely known than he is today, principally for two achievements – founding the first music festival at Glastonbury in 1914, intended to act as something like an English Bayreuth; and his opera The Immortal Hour (1922), which attained huge success on the stage. His choral drama Bethlehem (1915) became just as popular and was frequently performed by professionals and amateurs between the two World Wars. However, it was also the cause of the end of the Glastonbury Festival and Boughton’s widespread public acclaim when he staged the work during the miners’ lockout and General Strike in 1926: he demonstrated his Socialist principles by having Christ born in a miner’s cottage and Herod cast as a capitalist. That was too much for many financial backers, who promptly withdrew funding. Had he staged it today, one feels that he would have drawn attention to the situation in Palestine, especially in the connection with Herod as a murderous tyrant, who announces himself in the work as “he who reigns king in Judea and Isreal, and the mightiest conqueror that ever walked on ground”.
New Sussex Opera, with their laudable track record of reviving long forgotten and obscure operatic repertoire, bring this work to life in a semi-staged performance in unobtrusive modern dress at various ecclesiastical venues in their home county, not far off from the formal beginning of the Advent and Christmas season. Such locations emphasise the nature of the piece as, effectively, a sacred opera, based as it is on one of the mediaeval mystery plays which were designed to bring the incidents of the Bible to the people in vivid, dramatic form (in this case drawing upon the Nativity accounts in the Gospels for episodes recounting the Annunciation, the birth of Christ with the Shepherds and Angels, the coming of the Magi, and Herod’s rage with the Massacre of the Innocents implied).
In keeping with that demotic, popular ethos Boughton’s score is largely inspired by folksong (punctuated by his arrangements of various carols as choral interludes) though the style is more jaunty than similar music by Vaughan Williams, for example. But the performance in church raises its solemnity as an almost sacramental ritual, especially in the colourful environment of St Saviour’s Church in Eastbourne, whose Victorian architecture by G.E. Street, and paintings and mosaic decorations by Clayton and Bell, exemplify the Anglo-Catholic or High Church strand of Anglicanism. (Healey Willan also studied music as a young member of its choir school in the early 1890s incidentally.) Space is also well exploited by having the choir sing the a cappella first pair of choral interludes from behind the audience.
The mixture of professional and amateur singers here also cultivates the approachable aspect of the mystery plays – the drama is played out mainly among the four named major parts taken by prominent singers, while NSO stalwarts take the more generic roles. Where Mae Heydorn’s angel Gabriel hails from the heavens with a full-throated, vibrato-laden clarion summons to Mary, and James Beddoe is a commanding and hearty, rather than defensive, Herod, Mehreen Shah and Thomas Stevenson are more calmly cheerful as the more human couple, Mary and Joseph, at the centre of the story. Only two of Boughton’s three Shepherds are deployed here, and the Wise Men become Women instead, their music transposed up, thereby contrasting the brightness and formality of the latter with the Shepherds’ earthier goodwill.
In this uncredited arrangement of the music for piano alone, Phillip Sear accompanies discreetly but attractively, providing unflagging momentum and often subtle, rippling support like a harp, but injecting more dramatic impetus when necessary. Hilary Selby’s conducting makes the most of a charmingly unpretentious score.
Further performances at various locations to 23 November
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