David Lang may be most familiar to readers through his association with Bang on a Can, the multi-faceted new music organisation he helped found with Julia Wolfe and Michael Gordon. His latest work, the Pulitzer-prize winning ‘The Little Match Girl Passion’ based on the folk tale by Hans Christian Anderson, is the most striking thing Lang has yet produced. Providing a fittingly charged score to this harrowing narrative, employing a musical vocabulary at once straightforward and direct, with hidden layers of complexity, ‘The Little Match Girl Passion’ stays long with the listener.
Anderson’s fable, of a girl selling matches on Christmas who then freezes to death, has an air of timelessness, and is naturally attractive to musical adaption – Helmut Lachenmann has also produced a version. Lang’s libretto reduces the tale to bare fragments and, read alone, has the force of poetry; sung by the Theatre of Voices, the results are spellbinding. Using a small ensemble, with bells and percussion suitably evoking the yuletide setting, Lang’s music flits between creeping dissonance and choruses of sublime beauty reminiscent of Arvo Part, a favourite composer of the vocal group. The score was also based partly on J. S. Bach’s St Matthew’s Passion, and Lang’s work retains a comparable awe-inspiring power. Also included are a number of shorter works exploring similar musical and narrative themes, and these function as intriguing parallels to the superlative title piece.
Joshua Meggitt
