March to alternative Armistice ceremony, 11 November 1938 with PPU President and Labour Party Leader, George Lansbury, at its head. Note the white poppy wreath. Credit: ppu.org.uk
St John the Evangelist, Remembrance Sunday 10th November, 6 pm.
The evening service will include the first-ever Edinburgh performance of the deeply moving cantata “Dona nobis pacem” (c.1955), for voices, organ, drums and concertante piano, by the Aberdeenshire composer Ronald Center (1913-73), which juxtaposes Civil War poetry by Walt Whitman with liturgical and Scriptural texts, to shattering effect. It will be sung by the choir of St John’s under Stephen Doughty,. The piano soloist will be Christopher Guild.
Ronald Center was an exact contemporary of Benjamin Britten. Though Center’s music sounds nothing like Britten’s, it shares with the English master an overwhelming sense of the drowning of “the ceremony of innocence” by mindless violence. Center’s piano music in particular is filled with quotations from and echoes of nursery rhymes and children’s songs, and all his works juxtapose darkness and light, violence and innocence, beauty and terror, without ever offering the listener an easy way of ‘resolving’ the paradoxical coexistence of these opposites in human life. As a result, Center’s often disarmingly attractive music has power to disturb our complacency and self-delusion. This is particularly true of his cantata “Dona nobis pacem”. Center never gained the recognition that his work deserves, but on being introduced to his “Dona nobis pacem” Stephen Doughty, choirmaster of St John’s, readily agreed that it should form part of the St John’s Remembrance Sunday evening service. The guest pianist for this Edinburgh premiere, Christopher Guild, was born in Elgin. Now based in London and performing internationally, he is a great enthusiast for, and interpreter of, Center’s work. – Jamie Reid Baxter
