Graham Garton's Millennium Symphony premiered recently at St. John's Church to a modest audience of music lovers. As the composer's own programme notes query, why symphony? The question was not adequately answered in the notes, and even less so in the performance of the work. It is nearer a cantata.

Except for part One, the text is sublime. Not so the score.

It began with March of the Years, the sung text of which was numbers: 1 to 2000, each number representing a year. No poetry there; and 40 minutes that seemed to try the patience of many, if not most of the audience. The programme notes admit that the idea was in essence simple. Too true.

Part Two is a setting of Ben Okri's millennium poem Mental Fight. It is a magnificent poem, with its in-the-moment awareness of the infinite and the universal, of the prodigious powers latent within all humanity for good or evil and of the deep desire that humanity grows into the happiest fulfilment of its best self.

The finest service the composer has done is to bring this text to an audience who might never otherwise have seen it. My mental fight was with the musical language of the setting. It was a compendium of styles that reflected Verdi and Walton, among others. One yearned for an integrated style at the service of the text, rather than what appeared to be a display of all the styles there are, for church composers. The remarkable things were that the piece was written, and that it was performed.

The orchestra and chorus played and sang well, beautifully at times. The conductor led from his score as no one else could, and no one again probably would. Janet Budden worked hard on solos devoid of melodic content. We shall have to hear her sing something else; no doubt in the coming years we shall.

After the interminable March of the Years, which ended with the shout "The Second Millennium'' (snatching bathos out of the jaws of monotony), the second half, Mental Fight began with a Mahleresque off-stage solo trumpet announcement that morphed into a cadenza. Beautifully played. One tried to imagine this as the beginning of the piece, except that the torpor of the preceding movement hung around like unwelcome company.

Garton writes especially well for brass, and this section returned the compliment with superb playing. The percussion, too, deserves commendation.

Sometimes the attempt to have the orchestra sound out the sense of the text succeeds brilliantly, as in the fourth movement; the speed and suddenness of appearance is only that moment when we become aware... Garton has the orchestra play a musical representation of the Doppler Shift, that effect of a note bending that we hear when an ambulance rushes by. However, I must confess I missed the flight of arrows that was promised for 1066, during the `March of the Years'. The Allegro in the Second Movement also has an appropriate `Danse Macabre' for the text: O the hallucinations that can fall upon you when you resist revelation.

Similarly, there is a `March Macabre' for: O the nightmare vision Of Brueghel and Bosch... There are some mismatches, too. The setting of the chorus after the solo: `I dream of what can be' `A wonderful excuse for beginning... To conclude, the work would have been more effective without the tedious `March of the Years'. The work strikes one as more workmanlike and knowledgeable, than in any sense inspired. An awful lot of work, time, effort and money went into this production. One hopes that some of the satisfactions will have been musical.

Ronald Lightbourne MUSICAL REVIEW REV ENTERTAINEMENT ENTERTAINERS ENT CHURCH CHU