Later this morning I’m off to Warminster. Apparently that’s somewhere near Bath; I’ve only really checked how to get there by train. The name’s appropriate to what I’m doing there though, which is playing for a concert in the minster entitled ‘For the Fallen’. Viola of course, being an orchestral dep job (see previous comments on orchestral work across the two instruments). Actually there was another advert for a paid dep viola today, which if it hadn’t clashed I would have gone for. Now if only these openings would spread themselves out so I can try and bag them all, my income / expenses figures might look rather healthier …

The programme’s a somewhat interesting one. It’s a choral concert, but with Barber’s Adagio slung in to give the singers (and winds, apparently!) a break. The singers will certainly need it – the choral works are Elgar’s Spirit of England, an oratorio-type setting of three poems that’s a good half an hour long, and contemporary composer Paul Carr’s Requiem for an Angel, which despite the odd title is a full-blown requiem setting. Well, as full-blown as many of the well-known nineteenth-century settings – it misses out the Dies Irae as is often done since Fauré and adds in a couple of extra devotional texts. But it’s very much a full-scale art music requiem. I suppose people outside a very much devotional career-path still writing requiems isn’t that surprising – there’s the Rutter and Lloyd Webber ones, and a sort of precedent in the Jenkins Mass for Peace. But to approach it as (in some ways) thoroughly traditionally as this is perhaps interesting.

The Elgar strikes me more, though, from a very small amount of research. It seems to have originated with a suggestion, during the first world war, that Elgar write a requiem for the fallen; while the result is not that, it is a work directed at war dead and war suffering – the second movement is entitled ‘For Women’ and the text works on the assumption (pretty much entirely valid in WWI) that women remained at home (though by no means inactive or uncontributive to the war effort) while men were sent off to fight. However, two of its three movements were premiered in 1916 and the full work in 1917. So the interesting thing is that this is a work written in the middle of the war and before there was any good evidence Britain, France et al would be victorious. Perhaps for this reason, I find it relatively wonderfully free of the self-congratulatory and militaristic elements which so often taint our looking back at either world war – and in the case of the first I think it should be seriously questioned whether ‘our side’ can be seen as defending their country, democracy, freedom or progress any more than the other. But that should not lessen our sense of horror at the sheer brute suffering of those or any other wars.