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King's College Chapel, Cambridge
Nobody seems quite sure when Frank Martin's Golgotha was last heard in the UK, though Malcolm Sargent certainly conducted a performance for the BBC in the 1950s. It has remained rare enough for the composer's widow, Maria, now in her 90s, to make the journey from her home near Amsterdam to hear this one, which was part of the Easter week music at King's, with Stephen Cleobury conducting the Philharmonia Chorus and the BBC Concert Orchestra.
Martin composed the 90-minute work immediately after the second world war, spurred into tackling the subject by seeing Rembrandt's late etching The Three Crosses. He took the French text from the gospels, punctuating the narrative with extracts from St Augustine's Confessions, which are mostly sung by the chorus. The narrator's role is shared out between four soloists, with a fifth, a baritone, delivering the words of Christ. Though Bach's passions are models, it is only in the opening chorus and in the alto solo at the beginning of the second part where that influence is obvious; otherwise the declamatory word setting and its chromatic, dark-hued orchestral framework recall Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande more than anything.
It is an exacting, highly wrought work, and in the chapel's swoony acoustic it was the austere grandeur of the choral writing, imposingly delivered by the Philharmonia Chorus, that made the biggest impact. The fine soloists – Ailish Tynan, Susan Bickley, Christopher Gillett and Mark Stone, with Roderick Williams as Christ – struggled to get many words across, and listeners to the live BBC relay probably heard more of their contributions and the orchestral detail than we could in the chapel.
