Most period-instrument bands spend Lent playing as many Bach Passions as they can schedule, but here were the Dunedin Consort and conductor John Butt adding to their already impressive list of premieres with a brand new Passion. A co-commission with the Edinburgh international festival, where it will be heard in August, it is the fruit of the composer Tansy Davies’s long fascination with the elusive figure of Mary Magdalene.
Davies’s text draws on several sources including the second- or third-century, non-canonical Gospel of Mary, and weaves in evocative poetry by Ruth Fainlight. It unfolds steadily in a 90-minute span divided into seven episodes, related by eight singers – four women, four men. Mary Magdalene herself, radiantly sung here by Anna Dennis, is a visionary, with long passages of almost mystical words, the melody leaping from note to note; the other three women sing in chords, giving voice to an Oracle. It’s more of a meditation than a Passion-setting in the traditional sense, but there’s no new-age looseness: Davies’s score is tautly written. And the story gets told, if not in quite the usual way. Jesus’s first words – addressed here by the otherwise velvet-voiced baritone Marcus Farnsworth to Tim Lilburn’s countertenor demon – are an angry “Shut up!”, and some of Fainlight’s poetry is startlingly sensual.
Perhaps in a nod to Bach, it begins with a low note on the harpsichord, pulsing at walking pace. This returns several times, adding to the work’s sense of ritual and giving the music the sense of being linked to human movement. Davies has said she can imagine the work being staged, and perhaps it would best lend itself to being danced: Stravinsky’s choral ballet Les Noces comes to mind.
The music supports the singers, or adds a halo around them, with intricate skill. Instruments layer up and their phrases cycle round, getting slightly out of phase. Everything is cyclical and grounded but nothing stays quite the same. Almost hidden within the baroque ensemble, an electric guitar provides pinpoints of detail early on and the fleeting suggestion of a rock riff at the crucifixion itself. It all feels quite cerebral – and yet Davies’s intriguing score is its own reward.
• At the Edinburgh international festival on 8 August
