Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY TEATIME RECITAL: GUITAR ENSEMBLE and LEGATO CHOIR
Alan Cooper
25 March 2009
ZESTE AT CROMBIE HALL
Two new student ensembles formed recently in the Music Department bear admirable testimony to the vigour and dynamism that courses through Aberdeen University Music these days. The Guitar Ensemble directed by Martin Macdonald opened what proved to be a delightful surprise: one of this year’s most relaxing and laid back teatime recitals. The guitar is both one of the easiest of instruments to play and at the same time possibly the most difficult. It depends what you do with it. The opening piece was a fairly basic arrangement of Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies but it was particularly well thought out giving four of the six players the opportunity to synchronise their different abilities. As the concert progressed the six guitarists just got better and better with an attractive arrangement of Bach’s Air on the G String leading into a sizzling Latin American classic Tico Tico by the Brazilian composer José Gomes de Abreu (1880-1935) known professionally as Zequinha Abreu. The song was popularised in America first by Carmen Miranda and later by the Hammond Organ diva Ethel Smith who boasted that she could play it faster than any other living being. For my money though the Guitar Ensemble played it at the correct speed.
If Martin Macdonald’s Guitar Ensemble did well, Christopher Barr’s Legato Choir went way beyond that. First of all, the balance of voices was absolutely ideal with exactly four voices to each part and absolutely no passengers anywhere in this chorus. Bruckner’s Locus Iste was a glorious performance supported by a splendidly solid bass line and coloured by fine responses from every section of the choir to Christopher Barr’s well considered variations in dynamics and it was the choir’s strong sonorous bass contingent that we enjoyed so much in Locus Iste that made Rachmaninoff’s Bogoroditsye Dyevo (Music for the Mother of God) sound so authentically Russian.
Two pieces in a similar vein, Bob Chilcott’s Irish Blessing and John Rutter’s Gaelic Blessing were sung with a radiant gentleness that suited the mood of the words perfectly and then I particularly enjoyed the male voices’ stylish singing of Alan Simmond’s arrangement of the Antonio DeVita classic Softly as I leave you. This music is sometimes attributed to Georgio Calabrese, but he wrote the Italian lyrics, not the music.
Wednesday’s splendid debut recital by the Legato Choir was brought to an impressive conclusion with a piece by Eric Whitacre entitled Sleep. It featured some startling harmonies and a carefully sculpted pianissimo ending. I hope we will be hearing more from these new ensembles. They are both a credit to the Music Department.