Philip Sawyers
Mayflower on the Sea of Time
April Fredrick (soprano), Thomas Humphreys (baritone) et al; English Symphony Orchestra & Chorus/Kenneth Woods
Nimbus NI 6439 58:57 mins
Is the oratorio a dead form? Certainly not in Britain. Only recently we’ve had a recording
of Emily Howard’s powerful work The Anvil (Delphian), written to commemorate the 200th anniversary of Manchester’s Peterloo massace. Now comes Philip Sawyers’ Mayflower on the Sea of Time, captured in its Covid-delayed premiere last summer in Worcester Cathedral. It was composed to mark another milestone, the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower’s 1620 voyage to Plymouth Colony in New England. Contemporary oratorios, however, are not easy to bring off, and one of the lingering problems here is the wobbly tone of Philip Groom’s libretto, absent from the booklet but accessible by scanning the ubiquitous QR code. The text is inspired by the surviving diary of William Bradford, the Colony’s first Governor, with a clump of clotted Walt Whitman poetry arriving at the end.
Awkward or banal phrases like ‘making outsiders of the insiders’ and ‘Cape Cod, thank God’ aren’t the best gifts for any composer, especially an arduous one like Sawyers, who churns through an Atlantic ocean of changing harmonies and recurring motifs but whose ambitious score only reaches piercing eloquence when directly quoting a Thomas Tomkins motet.
Cast as different characters in the voyage’s story, the two soloists, particularly April Frederick, sometimes lose out to the work’s symphonic trappings and the orchestra’s heft, but there’s no doubting the jubilant unity of every participant, including the newly formed English Symphony Chorus, in the oratorio’s finale. As a champion of Sawyers’s music, Kenneth Woods conducts with all the passion, precision and devotion we might expect, though, at the end of the day, it wasn’t enough to convert this listener into a believer.Geoff Brown