Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Dello Joio: The Trial at Rouen; Goossens: The Apocalypse

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Heresy, martyrdom and the Beast with Seven Heads and Ten Horns: all this is in store for your Lenten listening this Sunday, as I present two mid-twentieth-century works--the first an actual opera, the second an oratorio.

Norman Dello Joio (1913-2008) wrote both music and libretto for The Trial at Rouen (1956), which was intended for television broadcast by the NBC Opera Theatre. The Italian-American composer came from a deeply Catholic background. His father was both a church organist and piano accompanist at the Met. As a boy he read of the lives of the Saints, so the story of the martyr, Joan of Arc, was familiar to him. Young Joan, the Maid of Orleans, in gender-bending military garb, rallied the French forces in the war against the English invaders. At Rouen the English had her put on trial for heresy by the Church's holy court of Inquisition. She was burned at the stake in 1431. Eventually, however, the Church had her canonized in 1920.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) and Odyssey Opera revived The Trial at Rouen in concert performance, as recorded at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Mass. in 2017. Gil Rose directs the musical forces. Soprano Heather Buck stars as Joan. She does a great job in the role, in the opinion of Fanfare magazine's reviewer Michael DeSapio. He praises Dello Joio's music, too. He concludes his review: "Thank you, Gil Rose, the BMOP and Odyssey Opera, for giving us back this masterpiece..." (Fanfare, Mar/Apr, 2021). The Trial at Rouen was released in 2020 on two compact discs through the proprietary BMOP Sound label.

Sir Eugene Goossens (1893-1962) came from a distinguished English musical family. Although he was primarily a conductor, like his father and grandfather, he was a considerable composer, too. He wrote music for his brother Leon, a virtuoso oboist. He also ghost-wrote a modernized arrangement of the music of Handel's Messiah for his colleague Sir Thomas Beecham. Goossens conducted orchestras here in America and in Australia. The Sydney Symphony Orchestra premiered his oratorio The Apocalypse in 1954.

The composition of this work dates at least as far back as 1949. Because of the enormous performing forces required, the Goossens Apocalypse has rarely been presented to the public. The Sydney Symphony gave it the world premiere recording it deserved, made live in performance in the Concert Hall of the Sydney Opera House in 1982. The concert was carried on radio by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Myer Fredman conducted the orchestra and the Sydney Philharmonic Choir, with six vocal soloists. The sonically stunning recording finally made it onto compact disc courtesy of the UK label Lyrita in 2018. The style of the Goossens oratorio was conservative for the 1950s. It seems to take up where Holst's The Planets leaves off. The Book of Revelation provided Goossens with scene after scene of visionary bliss or horror.

This will not be the first time I have programmed a work with this title. An "electronic opera" called Apocalypse (1993) by Alice Shields went over the air on Sunday, October 2, 1994 on a silver disc issued by the American CRI record label.