Requiem for America review – Brent Michael Davids gives the invisible voice in his urgent new work

Amid the celebrations of the 250th anniversary of US independence, Brent Michael Davids’ Requiem for America brings an abrupt and necessary shift of perspective. Subtitled “Singing for the Invisible People”, it tells of the colonisation of North America and the systematic erasure of its Indigenous people. We don’t hear the text of the Latin mass; instead Davids, a composer of Mohican heritage, has constructed a patchwork of first-hand sources: newspaper articles, military reports, telegrams, rare accounts from the survivors of massacres. It is, as Davids describes it, both a reckoning and a remembrance: it’s meant to be shocking, and it is.

Perhaps it’s not surprising that this premiere should have happened outside the US; nonetheless, a further performance is planned for Boston in November, of an even longer version. Here a lot was packed into 90 minutes by a stageful of musicians: the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, an eight-strong Native American choir, four vocal soloists as if for a traditional setting of the Requiem – and, to the conductor Teddy Abrams’s right, the mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, a late stand-in who sang the Narrator with tremendous conviction, and Davids himself, playing the Native American flute.

In most of the 15 movements, Giunta would begin telling the story, accompanied by Davids’ flute, before handing it on – to the choir, or to one of the soloists, taking on a specific character. Davids’ music is built up in layers of figuration, thickly textured and sonorous, and yet it allows the voices to be heard.

What those voices have to say makes hard listening. We hear from the boy hiding under a hut where a massacre took place, watching blood trickle through the boards; the medic recounting how a regiment fired on an unarmed group of Lakota families; another movement tells powerfully of a long death march, the Narrator singing out the miles, the choir listing the tally of dead. It’s striking early on how much it was claimed that all this was God’s will; the chorus sang out brightly in snatches of hymn tunes, ironically used.

There are no heroes. Teddy Roosevelt, given stentorian voice by the tenor Robert Murray, comes out badly, but most disappointing of all is author L Frank Baum, who in a newspaper article seems to be arguing simultaneously that the Native Americans are a spent force and yet the only way for the colonisers to be safe is to eradicate them completely.

Finally, after so many atrocities recounted, comes a chorus affirming the Indigenous people’s endurance: we are still here. Here it’s the Native American choir’s music that triumphs, the rest of the voices taking it up joyfully, before the music dissolves into birdsong courtesy of four twittering bamboos – tiny instruments twirled on strings by the percussionists and the Narrator. It’s a gentle, hopeful end to a heavy, urgent, necessary work.