THE CHOIR OF KING'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE
Musica Viva Australia,
Concert Hall, Queensland Performing Arts Centre
Thursday July 25, 2024
Choir of King's College, Cambridge
This distinguished group is making its ninth tour for Musica Viva Australia, and this time around it is playing to its strengths - at least as far as the Brisbane program is concerned. One characteristic not on show in this Program 1 is British music; whereas the second bill of fare includes pieces by John Bull, Tallis and Judith Weir, the solitary sample of home-grown art for us was Edgar Bainton's Revelation Chapter 21 setting, And I Saw a New Heaven. For the rest of this event, the accent fell on France, the main element being Durufle's Requiem of 1948, with two Messiaen organ solo side panels. A bit of German British maybe in Handel's Zadok the Priest, a Venetian excursion with Gabriel's O Magnum mysterium setting of 1587, followed later by an American detour for Martin Laurindsen's 1994 popular version of the same text, and a friendly antipodean nod through Sydney-based composer Damian Barbeler's recent setting of Charlotte, a poem by Judith Nangala Crispin.
Not that you can complain about facing a mixed program because it shows the versatility of the executants - well, it's meant to do so. But a real practical problem arrived when trying to work out which of the organ scholars - Harrison Cole and Paul Greally - was actually playing specific items. I found out later from the organization that the pair both contributed in the first half while Greally performed the Durufle. My eyesight is certainly not what it was and the players were a fair way up the back wall of the Concert Hall, but I had the allocation of labour completely wrong. Time for the opera-glasses, I suppose. Even so, I can't specify who accounted for the two Messiaen extracts.
Warming up the listeners with a golden oldie, director Daniel Hyde and his singers opened the night with Zadok the Priest, one of the organists having to work through that long introduction with an abrupt shift in dynamic (keyboard?) early in the process and without the benefits of a true slow crescendo or the initial fluorescence of three violin lines, not to mention the original's instrumental explosion of three trumpets and timpani when the choir begins its work at bar 23. On top of all all that, the sopranos were unusually faint (drowned?) in the opening choral strophes and the interpretation sounded effete and over-studied, especially when compared to sturdy, top line-reinforced performances like that at the recent British coronation ceremony.
It was unexpected to have an organ supporting the double choir Gabrieli motet, especially as I couldn't find an edition with such underpinning. What you can come across are readings where some of the vocal lines are given to instruments (those trustworthy Venetian trombones), but who's to determine what universals obtain when dealing with the Renaissance-to-Baroque crossover years? Here was a much more telling sound despite the work's eight vocal lines, probably because of the disposition of these voices into a treble-dominated group set against a middle/bass-heavy complement-partnership. Further, the approach was informed by an attractive suppleness, notably in the shifts to the congruence of all parts, as in its first occurrence at bar 10. As with Zadok, the output sounded very well-mannered and lacking any European coarseness of dynamic or fracturing of the ensemble's cool temper.
Whichever one of the scholars gave us Les anges from Messiaen's La Nativite du Seigneur generated a mobile series of phrases and harmonic shocks (oh, those multiform modes of limited transposition) and a striking suggestion of ethereal animation, the specifically designated birth corps dancing on the heads of a plethora of needles - in this instance, to celebrate a very pointed moment of transubstantiation.
For a soft leavening, the choir sang the Laurindsen setting of O magnum mysterium which gave the audience a recovery space through its deft concordances and fluent part-writing. This is a gift to any choir with sufficient breath control and the Cambridge musicians made a strong case for its quiet benevolence, although to my ears the finest interpreters of this music are American university bodies whose sopranos yield little to these British boys in intonational exactness but whose basses are, at their best, more full-bodied and supportive. While the attack on the work's two opening phrases was clumsy, the conclusion proved to be as spellbinding as ever.
Time now for the second Messiaen. This was the toccata specially written to replace the third movement of the orchestral version of L'Ascension when the composer decided to transpose it for organ: Transports de joie d'une ame devant la gloire du Christ qui est la sienne - always the man for a catchy title. One of the Cole/Greally partnership worked through this with some of the improvisatory eloquence shown by the composer in his own recording, even if a couple of manual changes were awkward (when are they not?) as the Swell sounded under-powered. But that might have come from an unfamiliarity with the Klais instrument, not much time elapsing between this appearance and the two Melbourne opening stops on this eight-session national tour. However, the executant made a brave showing in the final stanzas from the Plus vif to that exuberant final cadence.
Back to a more prosaic vision of bliss with Bainton's treatment of the first four verses of St. John's towering vision of the new Jerusalem. This is standard Anglican content from the venerable Parry/Stanford tradition (the composer was a pupil of the latter) and the level of ecstasy is kept to a restrained level; more noticeable when coming after the French organ master's confronting excesses. As you'd expect, these singers were quite comfortable with this elegantly phrased anthem; you can see this in operation on an Easter 2020 performance under Hyde on YouTube which has the benefit of the rich acoustic in the College's chapel.
Finishing the night's first half was the new work by Barbeler, Crispin's poem concerned with searching for information about her great-great-grandmother. The composer is fond of single chanted lines that can intermesh or stand in contrast with each other. These tend to be static while his harmonized passages alternate between sweet and discordant: a fair mirroring, then, of the poet's journey to a kind of fulfilment. The more white civilization is referred to, the more strained the harmonic vocabulary - or so it seemed to me - but the work rises to an angry. declamatory climax. At the end, the singers throw sheets of paper into the air, a piece of theatre that seemed to this observer to represent a suddenly disturbed flight of white cockatoos. I found the gesture rather disturbing, but one old fellow a few rows back cackled with delight; as with our varied reactions to the Voice referendum, you just can't tell. Still, Barbeler constructed a definite atmosphere reflecting the poem's desolation in the search for and discovery of Charlotte's photo.
The Durufle Mass features regularly on the King's College Choir performance schedule at home, alternating in November with the Faure Requiem. You'd therefore anticipate an ease with its textures and dynamic stability, and this facility was pretty much in evidence, right from the plainchant Requiem aeternam setting up to the death-mollifying In paradisum. After the placid Introit, the choir's Kyrie enjoyed some welcome Christe eleison angst. You were pressed to find fault here, as in the following Offertorium which distinguished itself with a memorably affecting final Quam olim Abrahae.
The organ ripples that sustain the Sanctus opening didn't so much misfire as miss an ecclesiastical ambience; put simply, the Concert Hall acoustic proved too dry for many parts of this Mass, in particular these pages. But that deficiency was apparent even from the opening Zadok ritornello which has become familiar to us form performances recorded in more reverberant spaces.
I believe the solos in this reading - for the Offertorium, Pie Jesu and Libera me - were sung by groups, not individuals. Certainly the contralto Pie Jesu solo was handled by a group of boys who gave the final sempiternam a finely poised decrescendo. The return of full forces for the Agnus Dei brought us some of the night's best concerted work, even if the organ's swell-box manipulation sounded awkward at one point. And there is little left to say of the final three movements, except to note some intonational discomfort in a unison passage during the Lux aeterna, a worthy demonstration of reserved ferocity when Durufle gets around to the Dies illa of the Libera me, and a sense of regret for us all that the In paradisum is so short.
Very little drama disturbs the progress of this Requiem which is packed with soft floating passages, the composer avoiding the passions roused in so many other writers by the Sequence and the desire to make a visceral experience out of a mass for the dead. Like its Faure counterpart, it suits boy sopranos in its sober tranquillity. Despite lengthy stretches of calm meditativeness, the work's standard of accomplishment pleased a well-packed Concert Hall which showed a desire to be gratified throughout - even by those striking organ solos. Sadly, this popular approval resulted in most of the Mass's movements being greeted by applause - in many another case, not such a bad thing but, with this work, these interruptions disturbed the score's cumulative effectiveness.
By the way, one of the sopranos - fourth from the left, facing the stage - embodied a delight that you sometimes come across in choirs: a lad who is transported by his work, slightly weaving in sympathy with the musical complex, lowering his score often enough to convince you that he knows the material thoroughly, ever alert to Hyde's direction.
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