It is a quarter the usual length of a requiem. It contrives not to mention God, Heaven or Hell. And it is scored for such unusual forces that it is destined to be performed once in a blue moon. Yet Giles Swayne’s The Silent Land must be one of the most powerful memorial pieces written in recent years. It uses the same number of voices as Tallis’s 40-part motet, Spem in Alium, and marshals them into rich bursts of polyphony, dense cluster-chords or polychoral declamations with much the same degree of mastery.
But Swayne adds another line: a solo cello, representing the soul of the dead person whom the singers are lamenting in the words of Dylan Thomas, Christina Rossetti and snatches of the Requiem text. The cellist weaves his own anguished swansong, adding to the charged atmosphere. In the spacious resonance of King’s College Chapel — performed by the BBC Singers and the young Swiss cellist Christian Poltéra under Stephen Cleobury’s direction — I found it overwhelmingly moving.
The rest of this Cambridge Music Festival concert didn’t quite match up. With 40 voices already assembled, it made sense to give us not just Tallis’s masterpiece but the “other” 16th-century 40-part motet — Alessandro Striggio’s Ecce beatam lucem, which probably predates it.
Striggio’s work is full of darting rhythmic interplay, but little came through here — the fault not just of the acoustic but of a choral style (also apparent in Bach’s Lobet den Herrn) that had too much stodge and too little deftness.
There was some less than beguiling solo singing, too, in Swayne’s Four Passiontide Motets, taken from his 2004 Stabat Mater. A pity, because elsewhere Cleobury drew fine, rich textures out of these pieces, which cry for peace in several ancient languages and move from glowing triads to dark realms of dissonance.
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Between the choral pieces, Poltéra played Bach’s Suite No 1 in G. The last time I heard a cello playing Bach in this chapel was 30 years ago, and the performer was Rostropovich. Poltéra has a much lighter touch, he plays in tune, and his phrasing is elegant. But he, too, misjudged the acoustic, skimming over notes rather than giving them space to resonate. You sometimes wish performers in King’s could hear their playing from the back. Some would rethink on the spot.