Credo / I believe opens with ostensibly conventional plainchant, intoning the expected Latin text of the Creed. However, a spoken element in English soon arises in the background; unsettlingly, this ‘inverts’ the statement of the Latin text into a subversive or possibly accusatory question, after the fashion of a forced interrogation. The plainchant persists, becoming part of a mildly dissonant chorus. As yet, Lotti has made no detectable contribution, although hindsight will allow us to see Kastelic’s material here as preparing the way for Lotti’s fractured emergence, not least because both ‘musics’ emanate initially from the bottom of the texture, bubbling up from the emotional depths. In due course the chorus takes over the interrogative ‘Do you believe?’—but cuts out before the words ‘in one God’.

A keening soprano soloist is soon added, heightening the unsettlingly enigmatic nature of the unfolding drama. By now the whispering, agitating spoken voices are dismantling words into isolated syllables and the plainchant has disappeared, as if tuned out by distracting ‘white noise’. From this challenging terrain Lotti’s Cruxifixus begins to surface—but Kastelic displays masterly patience and control in feeding to the listener only inchoate, disfigured fragments; these form a kind of aural palimpsest. While the listener’s prior familiarity with the Lotti original is not essential, it will enable them the better to grasp the meeting points of quotation and re-invention.

The Latin text accelerates, attaching itself to agitated four-note descending scales and emphasizing the narrative sequence ‘Crucifixus … passus … sepultus’ (‘Crucified … suffered … buried’). An angry climax is generated. At length, music recedes altogether and, literally, religion is all finished bar the shouting. From this degeneration into chaos arises a lone female voice, silencing the clamour by uttering the unthinkable: ‘No! I do not! Want to believe! Do you? Do you still believe?’

Reference to Kastelic’s spoken subtext makes explicit the composer’s subversive agenda: the interrogative voices may be those of contemporary political repression, representing some of the modern world’s challenges to faith; or they may be our own inner voice of disillusionment and alienation from religion. Similarly, ‘glorifying, rulers, kingdom’ may allude to some celestial world to come, or else (cynically) to ways in which established Churches of one hue or another have always expediently managed things to their own political and material advantage. Kastelic poses unanswerable questions and sits at the opposite end of a spectrum from the devotional conviction of Olivier Messiaen. Credo / I believe subsides finally into a troubled darkness, petering out rather than truly ending. The printed score includes visual and gestural instructions reflecting its composer’s experience writing for theatre; and the composition’s potential for visually arresting staging is not in doubt.

from notes by Francis Pott © 2023