Some may feel they have had enough of Americans lecturing us about our failings. But at least the New York-based composer Julia Wolfe is on the other side of the political fence from the usual suspects. Rather than “drill, baby, drill”, her 2023 climate-change oratorio unEarth, given its UK premiere at the Barbican, offers the opposite viewpoint, bewailing the desecration of nature and ending with a call to “clean up your corporation” because “hope requires action”.
Indeed it does. But an oratorio, no matter how impassioned an environmental warning it carries, also requires a modicum of memorable music. Wolfe gives us just about everything else, but not that.
There are words drawn from the Bible, Emily Dickinson, the ecological observations of teenagers and earnest newspaper articles about habitat destruction. She summons ranks of choristers of all ages. Her orchestral fortissimos are reinforced by what seems like every percussion instrument on the planet.
• Read more classical reviews, guides and interviews
The word “tree” is chanted in about 50 different languages. And, just in case the audience gets bored, a giant orb above the performers carries projections of savage seas, suffering rainforests, alarming headlines and cute kids smiling imploringly. The message is rammed at us with sledgehammer subtlety. We are imperilling their future.
Yet the musical invention never rises to the challenge of presenting this well-worn environmental jeremiad in a striking new way. Much of the choral chanting (though delivered with spirit by the Finchley Children’s Music Group, National Youth Voices and the men of the BBC Singers) sounds like Carl Orff without the tunes.
Else Torp delivered a selection of unearthly timbres
MARK ALLAN
Underneath that, or sometimes overwhelming it in a blitz of gongs and drums, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, impeccably conducted by Martyn Brabbins, ran through a gamut of film-score clichés from ominous throbbing clusters to minimalist riffs. And over the top, in more than one sense, the soprano Else Torp delivered a truly weird selection of unearthly timbres slithering around the quarter-tones. I think she was supposed to represent the suffering of Mother Earth. It certainly sounded like it.
Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring — that pellucid evocation of America before industrialisation — served as a prelude to Wolfe’s multimedia, many-layered blitz. Beautifully played, it was a timely reminder that often less is more.
★★★☆☆
Broadcast on Radio 3, Feb 12, then available on BBC Sounds