Atlantic Requiem review – Önaç gives historical slavery documents howling raging life

How do you put a value on a human life? If you’re an insurance underwriter that’s not a philosophical question, it’s a practical one. The answer, incidentally, as calculated by Lloyds of London in 1779 was £45: the figure placed on each enslaved person transported across the Atlantic alongside corn, fish and other cargo. Court transcripts from two decades later describe a woman quarantined for smallpox, subsequently bound, blindfolded and tossed overboard tied to a chair. The captain later expressed his regret for the loss of “so good a chair”.

Archives can tell us what, but it takes art to give us the human how of the past. Enter composer David Önaç – commissioned to take the historical documents unearthed from the Lloyds archive and give them howling, raging life in his new Atlantic Requiem, premiered this weekend by the London Symphony Orchestra, an expanded BBC Singers, three soloists and (in a last-minute step-in) conductor Malcolm J Merriweather.

This is a big piece – in theme and scope. Önaç’s score is beautifully, seriously constructed, turning the pitches of the piano’s white and black keys into symbolic gestures of opposition, equality and – perhaps – reconciliation. It’s a microcosm of a work in which the syncopated funk and alternative scales of jazz and blues drift into the western classical architecture of the Latin requiem mass, Gregorian chant bleeds into the chattering banality of bureaucratic recitative, and soloists soar but also scream. The conversation is particularly effective in the convulsive dance of the finale – a chewily textural, highly rhythmic intervention after the rapt choral meditation of the Agnus Dei.

Merriweather steered his forces safely through the choppy musical waters, though soloists Brittany Renee, the ever-expressive J’Nai Bridges and especially tenor Orson Van Gay II risked being overwhelmed from their position behind the orchestra. In many ways this pair of Sunday afternoon performances at LSO St Luke’s (too small for so large a project) felt like a workshop for a piece still under construction. Önaç packs a lot into a short span, at the expense of pacing that feels almost perfunctory. There’s a full-length work here dying to get out, and a major new composing talent who deserves the space to tell the stories that have been silenced for so long.