Mystical Sources

By Ivan Hewett, *Salisbury International Arts Festival: Fanfare for the common ground* - The Telegraph - London, UK; Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Christianity and Islam meet in a new oratorio written for the city’s cathedral. Hallelujah, says Ivan Hewett.

'The lamps are different but the light is one.” So wrote the great Sufi poet Jalal ad-Din Rumi, expressing the idea that all religions are really one and that praise offered to one deity praises all. It’s the guiding idea behind a new work, best described as a multi-faith oratorio, which will be unveiled at Salisbury International Festival.

Maria Bota, the festival’s director, has this year chosen “Bridges” as her theme – bridges between genres, cultures and religions. The great medieval cathedral of Salisbury is always at the centre of the festival, and so a work which threw a bridge between Christianity and another great world religion seemed essential.

By a happy coincidence, it turns out that Rumi was embarking on his life as poet and philosopher at the same time as the foundation stone of the medieval cathedral of Salisbury was being laid, in 1240. That initial idea has now blossomed into a 75-minute work entitled Where Two Worlds Touch, involving a professional choir of 70, a community choir of 130, four vocal soloists, a brass quintet, and a percussionist.

It’s the brainchild of author and storyteller Ashley Holland, who also chose the texts, which are spread across Christian and Islamic mystical sources. Musically it’s the joint creation of Howard Moody and Helen Chadwick, two composers from very different backgrounds.

For Moody, a keyboard player who’s worked with top-flight performers of Baroque music like John Eliot Gardiner and jazz musicians including John Surman, the piece was a homecoming. “I grew up as a chorister in Salisbury Cathedral, so this project is special to me,” he says. “The overriding factor in this piece was the cathedral and its fabulous acoustic, which I wanted to celebrate.”

Chadwick comes at the project having sat at the feet of traditional singers in Ghana and Corsica, and worked in community opera. “The solo voice is my focus,” she says, “although I’m interested in choral singing, too. There’s a tradition of Gaelic psalm-singing on the Isle of Lewis which to me seems exactly right for this big space, as it’s a way of creating polyphony without having to be exact about the rhythmic co-ordination.”

And the poetry? “I’ve loved Rumi’s poetry for years, so I’m setting most of those, though I’ve also bagged a line from St John of the Cross that I love.”

While Chadwick is setting her share of the texts in English, Moody is setting his in the original. “I’m fascinated by the music of each language,” he says, “and also by the way the language affects the meaning. For example in Hebrew there’s no conditional tense, which helps to explain why [the] Jewish belief system is so rooted in certainty. In Arabic the phrase 'peace process’ is hard to translate because there are so many ways of saying 'peace’.”

The songs are almost all written, so now comes the business of knitting them together. “We’re having a trial run-through to see if the order works,” Chadwick says. “That’s when we’ll find out if there are any odd key shifts we need to change.”

The composers also face another logistical challenge, to do with the way the physical location of the performers changes during the course of the piece. “There’s a symbolic coming together of the two choirs,” Moody says, “which reflects the idea of the meeting of two traditions. At the beginning the professional choir is on the platform and the community choir is at the back, but by the end they’ve come together.”

In a world where tensions between Christian and Muslim are becoming more acute, this admirable attempt to illuminate the common ground between two faiths, is much to be welcomed.

Where Two Worlds Touch is at Salisbury Cathedral on May 21