St Peter’s Church, Petersfield, Saturday 26 October 2024
The printed programme of the Renaissance Choir’s concert on Saturday promised an evening of ‘relaxing music for Autumn’s mists’. Happily, this was misleading; none of the composers represented in the evening’s music – which ranged from the seventeenth to the twenty-first century – would have been aiming at ‘relaxation’, except in the sense of letting go of the day’s passing concerns in order to concentrate on something more fundamental. Under the committed leadership of expert conductor, Peter Gambie, the Renaissance Choir is a serious, accomplished and enterprising group, and its singers offered a varied programme of expressive and often intense music, by turn devotional, consolatory, picturesque and uplifting, with the added challenge that most of it would undoubtedly be new to the great majority of the audience.
The most sizeable single work was the 1621 Missa pro Defunctis – the Mass for the Dead – by Duarte Lôbo, the leading Portuguese composer of the Renaissance. Written in many short movements for liturgical use, this is not naturally concert music, and extracts from it were spread through the evening in four matching sections, separated by piano solos performed by Karen Kingsley. Each section started with music by Lôbo, followed by more recent works – a design that gave a degree of coherence to a programme that juxtaposed the most varied styles, and in which, although the mood was generally elegiac, only two of the choral pieces made any specific reference to autumn.
Framed by the Norman arch of St Peter’s – already centuries old when Lôbo was writing – the upper voices created an intensely evocative picture as they opened the concert with the plainsong introduction to the Introit of the Mass, followed by the majestic resonance of the full choir in eight-part polyphony. From Renaissance Portugal, the programme leapt to Jackson Hill’s 1982 Voices of Autumn, setting an ancient Japanese poem in a haunting minimalist style. Congratulations to the choir for tackling something that, as the programme note observed, was ‘well outside [their] normal orbit’. In its spiritual, atmospheric quality – its focused stillness finally vanishing to nothing in a wonderfully sustained diminuendo – it had perhaps more in common with Lôbo’s Mass than it had with the romantic motet by Rheinberger that followed. The four Rheinberger works – one in each section of the programme – all received affectionately prepared performances: expressive in the Abendlied, lively and rhythmic in Anima nostra, vigorous in Laudate dominum and quietly sensitive in Meditabor. With only a small contingent of tenors and basses, the upper voices often dominated the texture. A smoother blend and stronger harmonic support from the lower voices would have enhanced the richly romantic scoring both of Rheinberger and of Brahms, whose stirring double-choir anthem Wo ist ein so herrlich Volk brought the first half of the concert to a powerful conclusion.
Concert pianist Karen Kingsley, who has often worked with the choir, added seasonal notes in her interludes for solo piano. In the first half, Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons provided contrasting pictures in ‘September’ (a vigorous hunting scene) and the more plaintive ‘October’, where the tone of the St Peter’s piano, with its lid fully open, proved somewhat unforgiving. In the second half she performed Cécile Chaminade’s L’Automne, opening as a gentle ‘song without words’ before vividly depicting autumn gales in its stormy, virtuoso middle section.
The choir picked up the seasonal theme in the second half with Frank Bridge’s setting of Shelley’s Autumn, shaped with close attention to phrasing and dynamics, and with intonation just wavering at some unexpected harmonic twists. Rebecca Dale’s moving In Paradisum took the choir, again, impressively out of its normal orbit. A work not to be undertaken by the faint-hearted, it features gripping, sustained cluster chords and unpredictable vocal leaps somewhat at odds with Joyce Grenfell’s down-to-earth words. Just before the end came Robert Pearsall’s magnificent and much-loved Lay a Garland, probably the only work in the programme already known to many in the audience. The final Rheinberger motet, Meditabor, made a thoughtful conclusion to an evening that had been much enjoyed by the large and appreciative audience.
Philip Young
