Northern Sinfonia/Collon - review

3 / 5 stars
Sage, Gateshead

North-eastern audiences are becoming accustomed to the maverick choral works of the Sage's New Yorker composer-in-association, David Lang. Last year gave us his Pulitzer prize-winning secular passion, The Little Match Girl. Here, the eye-catching young conductor Nicholas Collon presented the British premiere of Lang's tribute to an iconic American socialist. Statement to the Court sets a hallowed text of the American Labor Movement, delivered in 1918 when the union leader Eugene Debs was convicted of sedition after opposing US involvement in the first world war. Though sentenced to 10 years, Debs went down in a blaze of charisma: "I say now that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free."

Lang's courtroom cantata is scored for strings, chorus and a bass drum that bangs out an insistent, solemn march throughout. The vocal writing is mostly in unison, with the singers effectively functioning as 15 individual Eugenes and a model of the unified society he wished to create. Though the egalitarian approach is fitting, the fragmented dispersal of the text made Debs's oratorical fluency sound surprisingly halting at times. But it built into a glorious apotheosis of stacked harmonies as the speech climaxes in a maritime metaphor in which Debs envisaged his country sailing towards enlightenment.

Leonard Bernstein's Symphonic Dances from West Side Story may seem to have become the intellectual property of a particular Latin American youth orchestra of late. Iain Farrington's lean new chamber arrangement was a delectable taster for the Northern Sinfonia's plan to present the complete musical in July, and a reminder that it is a great piece even without whirling trombones and Venezuelan tracksuits.