THIS brilliant 75-minute cantata is the best piece of community music-making I have seen in several years. It wasn’t just that the 200 performers — amateurs and professionals, tots, teens and grannies — were totally assured in voice and movement. Or that, time and again, the composer Jonathan Dove conjured breathtaking effects, ravishing tunes and spine-tingling ensembles.
Or that Alasdair Middleton’s libretto swooped like a well-read magpie on what seemed like every poignant or shocking piece of prose or poetry ever penned about the East End — from Dickens and Pepys to Jack London — and then wove them cleverly into a cogent narrative. Or that Clare Whistler’s simple but gripping production managed to utilise every aisle and gallery of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s monumental church.
No, what made this piece compelling was its total fidelity to the spirit of the place that inspired it — Spitalfields, that teeming patchwork of tiny streets in the heart of London, reborn with each new wave of immigrants, which has witnessed so much pain, poverty and dark tragedy over the centuries. While being nothing like a history lesson, On Spital Fields captured this most characterful of London hamlets in a series of sparse yet atmospheric tableaux: the benighted Victorian destitute huddled in the churchyard; the degradation of the silk-trade sweatshops; the riots born of desperation; the rude vigour of the market traders; and finally the birds and herbs that flourished in Spitalfields Garden, despite all the squalor, to keep alive the flame of hope and beauty.
All this Dove evoked stunningly. To his massed choruses of local children and residents he gave simple refrains, but always with an unusual twist, and often piled up into exhilarating, overlapping climaxes (impeccably marshalled by the conductor Gerry Cornelius). He also used a much more accomplished choir (the Joyful Company of Singers) to deliver rapid passages of declamation — a bit too rapid, sometimes, for complete comprehension — and two fine opera singers (Mary Plazas and Mark Wilde) to convey more intimate testimonies.
There were moments of ear-splitting apocalyptic brutality when Dove unleashed cacophonies of baleful brass (Royal Academy of Music students, up in the galleries) — to convey, for instance, the anger of the weavers’ rebellion. But he also used the chamber ensemble Chroma to produce both sinister shadows and moments of ethereal beauty, including one exquisitely calm, quasi-Elizabethan song for solo soprano and harp.
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It is entirely in keeping with Dove’s selfless composing philosophy that he has written a piece of such craftsmanship that may well never be performed anywhere else. But that only makes this Spitalfields Festival production the more precious.