The aftermath of the first world war created a number of new states in eastern Europe, countries that are now celebrating the centenary of their independence. Two weeks ago the London Philharmonic marked Czechoslovakia’s anniversary, but the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra’s salute to 100 years of Polish independence was more bespoke. Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducted the first UK performance of Faithful Journey, a 75-minute “mass for Poland”, by Roxanna Panufnik, whose father Andrzej was the CBSO’s principal conductor in the 1950s, after his defection to Britain.
Jointly commissioned by the CBSO and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra, which gave the world premiere in Katowice earlier this month, Faithful Journey uses the framework of the Latin mass to present a chronology of Poland since 1918. The liturgical texts are interleaved with settings of 11 Polish poems, delivered both in their original language and in English translation, and shared between a solo soprano and a chorus. In one poem the soloist sings the text in the original Polish, while the chorus underlines crucial words in English; in another, roles and languages are reversed. They trace the crucial events in the country’s 20th-century history, from prosperity between the world wars, through the Nazi occupation and the Soviet-dominated years, the protest movement and the rise of Solidarity, to the country’s current membership of the EU.
It’s a neat enough scheme, which Panufnik put together fluently, adding another layer by incorporating Polish folk tunes. But, apart from a handful of moments, the choral and orchestral writing is either banally literal or blandly unmemorable. There’s little to take away other than grand choral effects, though the CBSO Chorus projected them with tremendous authority, and Mary Bevan soared immaculately through the solo soprano writing, in music that fails to justify its scale and ambition.
It sounded too as if all the rehearsal time had gone on Faithful Journey and not quite enough on polishing Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker after it – not the extracts originally announced, but the first act of the ballet complete, so no Chinese Dance, no Sugar Plum Fairy. After all that well-intentioned grandiloquence a bit of childlike enchantment would have been welcome, but Gražinytė-Tyla didn’t conjure enough of that here.
