Day: 24 June 2009

The Tudor Consort at Lower Hutt

Posted on by Lindis Taylor

Around Renaissance Europe in 80 minutes

Music by Tallis, Byrd, Le Jeune, De Sermisy, Lassus, Issac, Josquin, Gombert, Palestrina, Marenzio, Victoria, Lobo, Morley, Gibbons, Weelkes

The Tudor Consort conducted by Michael Stewart

St James Church, Lower Hutt, Wednesday 24 June 2009

This is only the second time in their 23 year history that The Tudor Consort have sung at St James’s in Lower Hutt, both occasions as part of Chamber Music Hutt Valley’s concert season. There’s a general belief that singing doesn’t agree with fans of chamber music, but here was contrary proof: I sensed that the audience was bigger than for most of their purely instrumental concerts.

It was an Anglo-centric programme, starting and finishing in England, with a guided tour around Renaissance Europe – France. Spain, the Netherlands, Central Europe (meaning the German states) and Italy.

Michael Stewart’s pre-concert talk drew attention to the fact that France was not represented by any polyphony and England by only Tallis and Byrd. Though the latter two opened the evening, their pieces, a Pentecost motet by Tallis and Attolite portas by Byrd were among the more challenging pieces to bring off. The writing does not create the kind of almost naturally blended sound that the Continental polyphonists seem to produce; individual voices were more evident and the English composers’ intention was clearly to let the singers’ skills, and probably the force of the words, be appreciated.

The choir’s task was the greater challenge as a result of the church’s lack of reverberation, a surprise considering its size; the reason: acoustic tiles on the ceiling.

Loquebantur variis liguis began with fairly complex counterpoint at once, with long melismas on words like the first one. So the final line, ‘Gloria Patri et Filio…’,.sung in unison by the men, was all the more dramatic. 

The contrast with the two French chansons was striking, as Stewart had warned. Inevitably, their composers would have been unfamiliar to most, Claude le Jeune and Claudin de Sermisy, both working in the middle and late 16th century: both sung by a five-voice madrigal-style group. Le Jeune’s Revecy venir du printans was a charming song with quite a modern feel though the performance revealed a certain lack of ease. Au joli bois was in marked contrast: slower, more thoughtful with more touches of polyphony.

Orlando de Lassus, contemporary with Byrd, Palestrina, Victoria, was Flemish-born, but working in Munich, offered, for me, the first taste of the choir’s real strength in an imposing work, his Magnificat: Praeter rerum serium. Plain chant, evoking a much earlier era, alternated with polyphonic antiphons. Though they gave various opportunities for men’s and women’s voices alone, the masterly weaving of the counterpoint flowed with subtle dynamic variations while their dramatic pointing, such as emphatic attack on key words,

The heartland was reached before the interval, with the two other Flemish masters, Josquin and Gombert. Josquin’s Inviolata, integra et casta es revealed the beauties of the women’s voices in soprano-led passages, while Gombert’s Tulerunt Dominum demonstrated the choir’s control of long slow sentences in which volume and intensity ebbed and flowed.

Here the choir’s real talents, their careful vertical blending and contrapuntal textures, in great music, were most to be admired, all the work of conductor Michael Stewart.

After the interval there were shorter pieces. The ‘Kyrie’ from Palestrina’s landmark Missa Papae Marcelli and a succulent madrigal by Luca Marenzio.

Introducing the two Spanish pieces, Michael Stewart noted their performance a couple of days earlier for the visiting King Carlos of Spain, the Versa est in luctum by Lobo, wondering about its appositeness – for the funeral of Philip II in 1598.  Neither it nor Victoria’s O quam gloriosum was long: I’d have tolerated rather more of such beautifully sung music, a robust bass line lending it character.

Then and elsewhere, I thought again how the atmosphere would have been enhanced by dimmer lighting.  Lighting has always been a matter of which the choir has taken care: it really matters.

We were then back in England, with two madrigalists, Morley and Gibbons. The latter’s The Silver Swan, was short, adroit, stylish, if perhaps without brilliant vocal contrasts – but that’s the dilemma of demanding very different genres from one group of singers – this one, trained, and perfect, in complex polyphony.

So they did well to end with Weelkes’s Gloria in excelsis Deo which again demonstrated their true skills in highlighting stereophonic effects, tossing phrases from section to section, and the beautiful balance and blending of voices within each section.

 

 

 

Orpheus Choir – Cloudburst

Posted on by Peter Mechen

CLOUDBURST

ERIC WHITACRE – Three Songs of Faith / Cloudburst
DANIEL LEVITAN – Marimba Quartet
MORTEN LAURIDSEN – Lux Aeterna

Barbara Graham (soprano)
Handbell Ringers from Wellington Cathedral of St.Paul
Members of the Vector Wellington Orchestra
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Richard Apperley (organ)
Michael Fulcher (conductor)

Wellington Cathedral of St. Paul, Wednesday 24th June 2009

Considering that this concert was subtitled “Contemporary American Choral Classics” one could be forgiven for anticipating with great interest and perhaps some caution the kind of musical fare which was to be served up by the Orpheus Choir and their conductor Michael Fulcher. Would the music be esoteric, austere, remote and dissonant, in a ‘modern” manner, as opposed to the use a more traditional language and tonal idiom? Or would the result be something of an amalgam of old and new? I’ll risk a certain amount of derision by admitting that I had never heard of Eric Whitacre, nor Morten Lauridsen, before this concert, which enabled me to come to their music freshly and without preconception. I thought Whitacre’s music the more interesting of the evening’s two vocal composers, with his opening Three Songs of Faith (settings of poetry by ee cummings) filled with wholehearted responses to the musicality of the poet’s texts, the wonderfully arching lines and the delicious rhythmic delineations of the phrases and words most surely matched by the composer’s musical imagination.

The first one I will wade out was marked by its wonderfully leaping opening, whose buoyancy was splendidly conveyed by the choir and further glorified by the church’s reverberant acoustic. That same angular muscularity returned at the words “I will rise” after a haunting ostinato-like treatment of “alive with closed eyes” and with the full “organum” of the voices giving expressive weight to “the sleeping curves of my body”. The music fused without a break into the second poem I hope via atmospheric cluster harmonies, each individual word treated like a variation on a tolling bell with the sounds rolling over each other, until with the word “soul” the voices come to rest, suggesting an eternity in each phrase-breath of the music. The last poem  I thank You God for most this amazing  began from these same ethereal regions, swelling and growing upwards, the soprano soloist Barbara Graham adding her voice to the words “which is yes”, and reaching a point of transcendence at “I who have died am alive again today”, with quietly ecstatic modulations, and repeated clustered-chords.

As with the voices in quieter choral passages, the dulcet tones of the marimba in Daniel Levitan’s Marimba Quartet took on a more-than-usually unworldly aspect in the cathedral acoustic, the sounds almost disconcertingly disembodied, apart from the occasional szforzando. The instrumental timbres made a pleasing change as a foil for the choral items, though the effect was perhaps a bit generalised in such an environment, even if the rolling chords that linked the two movements certainly took us to distant realms of enchantment, almost a “Prospero’s Island” of sounds rich and strange. Jeremy Fitzsimons and the rest of the group from the Vector Wellington Orchestra handled their instruments with the expected flair and finesse, their contribution making a mellifluous impression as an interlude of musical abstraction.

Eric Whitacre’s work Cloudburst, which gave the concert its name, has brought its composer considerable success, winning an American Choral Directors’ Award, and being frequently performed world-wide. Intriguingly scored for a twelve-part choir and forces such as handbells, piano and percussion, it combined conventional and aleatoric techniques to produce an evocative pre-thunderstorm ambience, whose textures seemed to merge and overlap constantly, setting off the words of the Spanish-text poem by Mexican Octavio Paz which were variously sung (by both soloists and choir) and spoken. Speaker Linda Van Milligan’s nicely-focused delivery of “We must sleep with open eyes” worked magically against a choral backdrop, as did both Barbara Graham’s and Kieran Rayner’s singing voices, with Barbara Graham’s warm, rich tones at “…and return to the point of departure” in particular beautifully augmenting the flow of mystical radiance engendered by the choral and instrumental sounds . In places David Hamilton’s The Moon is Silently Singing came to mind, though the use of percussion gave Whitacre’s work more of a volatility in places, splendid drum rolls whose percussive impact filed the cathedral with sound.

Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna  is a kind of requiem, without following the normal liturgical sequences – more a meditation on the theme of “light” as employed in various medieval and renaissance texts. Written in 1997 for the Los Angeles Master Chorale, the work doesn’t seek to explore any avant-garde harmonies or melodic contourings, preferring instead to speak simply and directly, a world of musical language not dissimilar to that of Durufle, or even Faure. The Orpheus responded with firm lines and blooming tones, all beautifully balanced by Michael Fulcher, in the opening “Introitus” reaching towards ecstatic realms at the words “et lux perpetua” then with the reprise of “Requiem aeternum” building once again from a hushed,“experienced” viewpoint towards a sonorous fusion with the following “In te Domine, speravi”, where a rather more angular, somewhat questioning tone occasionally gave the music an unexpected twist, though the mood remained firmly grounded in the hushed tones of “Miserere nostri, Domine”. Warm, rich harmonies banished all dissent in “O nata lux de lumine”, the choir beautifully realising the tonal surgings towards “…nos membra confer effici”, the words delineating physical union with the blessed body of Christ.

Lauridsen’s setting of the well-known “Veni Sancte Spiritus” brought forth resplendent organ tones (Richard Apperley bestriding the organ console) with beseeching utterances from the choir, the whole swift-moving, celebratory and all-embracing, the organ breaking out with a final flourish at the end, leaving the voices to drift the music downwards and into the hushed, reverential depths of the “Agnus Dei”, a series of three varied choral recitatives repeating the opening words and augmenting the last of the three with the echoed word “sempiternam”. After this, the fugal treatment of “Cum sanctis tuis” begun by the tenors gave rise to a “many-tongues” effect, the final alleluias resplendent at first, then serene and rapt right at the end, with the organ softly joining in at the richly-deep-throated “Amen”. Not, I think, a great work, but an eminently approachable one; and here given every chance to make its full effect with some richly mellifluous and  strongly committed work from the Orpheus Choir under Michael Fulcher’s expert direction.