Peter Benoit (1834-1901)
Heaven and Hell
De oorlog (1869-73)
Lucifer (1866)
Kerstmis (1858)
Hoogmis (1860)
Te Deum (1862)
Requiem (1863)
Antwerp Symphony Orchestra
rec. 2015-22
No texts
Fuga Libera FUG825 [5 CDs: 297]
Not so long ago the label of the Royal Flemish Philharmonic (RFP013) released a two-disc set containing Peter Benoit’s Christmas Cantata, Messe Solenne, Te Deum and Requiem. They reappear in this 5-CD box from Fuga Libera to which two of Benoit’s other major choral works have been added, the better to form a release called ‘Heaven and Hell’.
Benoit, a Belgian, was born Pierre but preferred ‘Peter’ as it was less French and he was keen to establish a separate identity for Flemish music. The music in this box comes from a compressed bout of composition between the years 1858 to 1873, though the biggest work, Der oorlog (War) was begun in 1869 and took several years to complete. Four of the works, the earliest to be written (1858 to 1863) form a Christian cycle from Christ’s birth in Kerstmis, originally called Cantique de Noël, through Hoogmis (the Messe solennelle) thence to the Te Deum and finally to the Requiem. This sacred tetralogy is wildly uneven as to length. The Christmas Cantata Kerstmis lasts barely eight minutes, and is a rather charmingly decorative, pictorial work with a role for the tenor, here taken by Álvaro Zambrano.
Cast on a larger scale is the Messe solennelle Hoogmis of 1860. Benoit’s fast moving Kyrie is followed by a Gloria in which choral groups proclaim joy in clumps of affirmative sound. The Credo is the longest movement, featuring some sturdy choral writing. The work ends with the resilient warmth of the Agnus Dei. The Te Deum followed in 1862 and it’s saturated in Beethovenian writing to a disconcerting degree. Very competently written and with the grandest of climaxes it’s rather over-extended at only 18-minutes and the smallish audience responds with tepid applause. The tetralogy ends with the large-scale Requiem of 1863, a meditative work on death and the afterlife. Benoit’s musical forces are more focused and the tenor of the music-making more austere and owing less to Berlioz. In its piety and occasional stirring moments, its deft instrumental colour – Benoit is especially fine with harp arpeggios, if that doesn’t sound too mired in bathos – it makes for a fitting close to the cycle and the performance merits the warm applause.
Conventional piety derived from – ironically albeit unavoidably – French models inform Benoit’s writing, something that becomes magnified when dealing with the biggest works here, his pacifist oratorio De oorlog and Lucifer. This is where the problems really do build up. If one can accept his alternately meditative and jubilant religious quartet of works and also their jarring sizes, then De oorlog offers almost unsurmountable problems. It’s not merely that the vocal soloists are weighted heavily to the lower voices – soprano, alto, tenor, two baritones and two bass-baritones, as a work about war, which this is, inevitably privileges the male voices. It’s rather that, as George Bernard Shaw observed – I needed to look him up, thinking that he may have come across Benoit – he ‘was an excitable and imaginative musician, without the slightest originality as a composer…the essential poverty of his scores was only emphasized by their bigness, their ferocity, their grandiosity, their mechanical extravagance.’ He wrote that of Lucifer though it applies equally to Der oorlog – possibly more so. The first performance apparently featured 800 musicians so it was built on the grandest scale, with those soloists, four-part choruses, a small choir and a double upper choir in addition to the main choir. A kitchen sink and all the appendages in other words. Its huge scale is not matched by musical distinction. Yes, it drifts, wafted by paragraphs of Beethoven, Berlioz, even Haydn and there are patiently built climaxes as well as real vigour. However, vehemence and spectacle – the scale of the work – trump subtlety and, as Shaw noted tartly, imagination.
Lucifer is at least more compressed but it does last 80 minutes. The sense of characterisation – Lucifer is represented by a sinuous bassoon – offers a gloomy start to a work that is mired too often in updated Haydn choruses and writing that could generously be described as dogged. Benoit does throw in moments of calm hymnal writing and at least the music is more eventfully varied than Der oorlog – if Shaw found this work terrible, God knows what he’d have made of the pacifist oratorio – and it has one aria-like moment or two to interest. There’s a Devil’s Chorus, though it sounds about as evil as a thé dansant, and a variety of voices, vocal contrasts and blends. The use of the organ imparts a very churchy aura.
Benoit’s influences include the usual suspects already cited to which one could add Mendelssohn. That’s no bad thing, of course, but his ambition wildly outstripped his means and his sense of grandiloquence ensured his works would hardly ever get performed. Shaw added that he saw Lucifer with a friend who ‘fell off repeatedly; and when I awakened him he yawned as I have never seen even a musical critic yawn before. I am bound to admit that there was nothing whatever in M. Benoit’s music to keep him awake…’
All the performances seem well prepared and the conductors are expert at balancing the choirs and orchestras. The recordings are from three locations in Antwerp, two churches and the Queen Elizabeth Hall. There’s an 82-page booklet in English, Flemish Vlaams (I believe) and French but no texts, which is a particular problem for De oorlog and Lucifer. The Royal Flemish 2-CD set included full texts and translations of the tetralogy. Normally when I mention missing booklet texts some smart-aleck writes in to alert me to online sources and my answer is always the same. The consumer doesn’t want to read an online source when listening to the music. He may not even have an online source available. Texts should be in the booklet.
My feeling about Benoit in these works is that inside his grandiosity there’s a subtler voice. His instrumental finesse and French-inspired sense of colour – despite his own desire to establish a Flemish identity, he owes a huge amount to French models – are more suited to smaller-scaled works like the first part of his tetrology, not the Olympic superstructure of De oorlog. A more focused approach less saturated in Berlioz’s precedent might have achieved more.
Jonathan Woolf
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Contents
Der oorlog
Katrien Baerts (soprano), Cécile van de Sant (alto), Frank van Aken (tenor), Lars Terray (baritone), Bastiaan Everink (baritone), Charles Dekeyser (bass-baritone), Ivan Thirion (bass-baritone)/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Netherlands Radio Choir, Laurens Collegium, Octopus Kamerkoor, Meisjeskoor Waelrant, Waelrant Kinderkoor/Jac van Steen
rec. live 26 November 2022, Queen Elisabeth Hall, Antwerp and 25 November 2022 Avrotros, Utrecht
Lucifer
Renate Arends (soprano), Maria Fiselier (alto), Marcel Reijans (tenor), André Morsch (baritone), Werner van Mechelen (bass)/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Octopus Symfonisch Koor, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Kinderkoor van Opera Ballet Vlaanderen/Bart Van Reyn
rec. live 25 February 2017, Queen Elisabeth Hall, Antwerp
Kerstmis
Álvaro Zambrano (tenor)/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Octopus Symfonisch Koor/Jan Willem de Vriend
rec. live 22 December 2017, St Charles Borromeo Church, Antwerp
Hoogmis
Yves Saelens (tenor)/Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Octopus Symfonisch Koor/Martyn Brabbins
rec. 2016, Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Te Deum
Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Octopus Symfonisch Koor/
Martyn Brabbins
rec. live 16 and 18 June 2016, Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
Requiem
Antwerp Symphony Orchestra, Chœur de Chambre de Namur, Octopus Symfonisch Koor/
Edo de Waart
rec. 2015, Cathedral of Our Lady, Antwerp
