There are pieces that dare you not to feel something, and then there are pieces that make you ashamed for having needed the dare. James Whitbourn’s Annelies belongs to the second category.
Whitbourn — born 1963, trained at Oxford, shaped by the English choral tradition but never imprisoned by it — has spent much of his career navigating that treacherous middle ground where accessibility and seriousness intersect. He wrote once that writing for a broad audience is easy; writing with depth for that same audience is the hard thing. Annelies is where he put his money where his mouth was.
The subject is Anne Frank. Not the icon, not the symbol, not the pedagogical shorthand — the girl. Librettist Melanie Challenger, who came to this project after witnessing music’s almost physical power to restore the traumatized in postwar Bosnia, drew fourteen passages from the diary, rearranging word order where the musical line demanded it but preserving the essential grain of each entry. The result is neither oratorio nor song cycle but something in between — a sustained meditation, seventy-some minutes of it, that keeps pulling you back to the fact that its subject was a teenager who wanted to be a writer, who pinned a portrait of Queen Elizabeth on the wall of her hiding place, who wrote with ferocious confidence that if God let her live she would go out into the world and work for mankind.
She did not live. The diary did her living for her.
Challenger received the blessing of the Frank family before proceeding. That matters. Bernd Elias, Anne’s cousin, reportedly told Whitbourn after hearing the work that she would have been happy — as happy as he last remembered her. Whitbourn has said that stopped him in his tracks. It stops you too, if you let it.
This disc presents the chamber version, completed in 2009, which strips the original choral orchestration down to soprano, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. The instrumental choice is not incidental. These are the four instruments Messiaen had available when he wrote the Quartet for the End of Time in Stalag VIII-A in the winter of 1940–41 — the only instruments the prisoner-of-war camp happened to possess. Whitbourn did not set out to write a companion piece to Messiaen, but the shadow falls across the music anyway, and he would be the last to deny it. They are also, not coincidentally, instruments with deep roots in Jewish musical culture, and though Whitbourn made no programmatic attempt to incorporate Jewish melodic materials, something of that inflective world — the ornamental turns, the modal ambiguities, the tendency of a melodic line to reach upward and then fall back on itself as if in recognition of gravity — finds its way into the writing.
Soprano Arianna Zuckerman carries an enormous burden here, and she carries it with remarkable intelligence. Her voice has a clarity that reads almost as vulnerability — no chest-register steel, no operatic armor — and in a work about a girl who was murdered at fifteen, that quality is not a liability. It is the point. The Lincoln Trio (Desirée Ruhstrat, violin; David Cunliffe, cello; Marta Aznavoorian, piano) plays with the kind of tonal refinement that never tips into preciousness, and Bharat Chandra’s clarinet lines — especially in the work’s more anguished middle sections — have a keening quality that lingers. James Jordan draws the Westminster Williamson Voices into the texture with care, though in truth the choral writing is the element that occasionally strains toward the generic; Whitbourn’s individual lines are stronger than his choral masses.
The work’s architecture deserves respect. Whitbourn organizes the fourteen diary entries into a shape that rises, darkens, and then does something unexpected — it refuses a tragic ending in the conventional sense. The final pages are suffused with something closer to determination than lamentation, which is both emotionally honest and musically risky. Cheaper composers would have given us grief. Whitbourn gives us Anne Frank’s own defiance, and the effect is devastating precisely because it doesn’t reach for devastation.
Is it a masterpiece? I am not sure the question is quite the right one. Annelies is a work that does what it sets out to do with complete seriousness and considerable craft, and in a genre — the Holocaust memorial piece — littered with failures of taste, sentimentality, or sheer exploitation, that is no small achievement. Whitbourn earns his subject. So do these performers. The recording deserves to be heard.
