Review Details
MUSIC IN THE UNIVERSITY UNIVERSITY OF ABERDEEN CHORAL SOCIETY AND SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Alan Cooper
12 November 2009
Music Hall
I can’t seem to find any bad concerts to go to these days. After having had to park my car miles away, I arrived in the Music Hall last night soaked and with a pair of nearly new shoes practically written off after splashing through puddles on the pavements as I struggled against the elements to get to the venue. I was up for it when I finally arrived! I was ready to get out my thesaurus of cruel words and give someone a real drubbing. Not a chance! Aberdeen’s weather might have been doing its worst outside but inside the Music Hall we were about to be bathed in the balmy sunshine of three of the most attractive pieces in the French repertoire, courtesy of Fauré and Poulenc.
They say “music soothes the savage breast” (Congreve) and when I left the Music Hall last night my savage breast had been well and truly soothed, first by the Symphony Orchestra’s hauntingly beautiful performance of Fauré’s Pavane, then by the joyful and declamatory choral and orchestral sounds of Poulenc’s Gloria and finally by a radiant performance of Fauré’s Requiem that might even have got the likes of me into Heaven, albeit through a side door.
In Fauré’s Pavane the spotlight falls first on the solo flute and with prize winning flautist Kay Ritchie on the task you would not get a more beautiful sound from any orchestra in the world. The rest of the woodwind took their cue from her and soon got themselves nicely in focus and a hypnotic performance simply took off from there. Paul Mealor’s no nonsense conducting and unobtrusive style is to be praised in no small measure for this fine performance. Everything he did was absolutely to the point.
The choral singing in Poulenc’s Gloria was simply superb but then as I have discovered with Paul Mealor’s direction of Con Anima, this is one of his areas of true expertise. The entry of the tenors in Patris qui tollis, a particularly treacherous moment, was spectacularly well done. I remember a performance when as part of the bass line we could not help exploding in laughter as the tenors came in like machine gun fire all over the place. This was only in rehearsal but the performance was not all that much better. The orchestra too gave a heroic performance of a difficult score. If at the beginning there was a slight lack of focus and clarity, this was soon dealt with. The timpani were “explosive” (thank-you Alistair Macdonald for that) and the horn trills were superb. In the introduction to the soprano solo, Domine Deus the woodwind “slides” were perfectly together. I suspect this must have been where John Williams went to borrow part of his score for the first Star Wars film. Gillian Jack gave a splendid performance of the solo part in this work, her voice easily rising above the rest to impress.
I was also blown away by the performance of Fauré’s Requiem after the interval. Here the choral singing was even more glorious. Without ever becoming too heavy or too thick with such a huge choir, the singing had a wonderful smooth richness and depth to it. George Chittenden gave a beautifully restrained performance of the organ part as did the timpanist with his, both absolutely in keeping with the gentleness of the music, a revolutionary idea when Fauré first tried it. In his Requiem for instance Verdi pulls out all the stops to give us a terrifying picture of the Dies irae. Fauré restricts this just to a momentary outburst from the brass and last night I approved the unusually strong playing of the four horns who gave this a slightly greater emphasis than I am used to. From now on I will be hoping to hear it done that way. The dark tones of the lower strings that colour much of this work were nicely delivered too.
Paul Tierney gave a beautifully light and gentle performance of the two beautiful baritone solos in the work. His voice was just perfect for this music and in the Pie Jesu, Gillian Jack’s silver tones were just right too reminding me of the first recording I ever bought of this work with the Belgian soprano Suzanne Danco as soloist. In that recording conducted by Ernest Ansermet however, the choral singing was spectacularly awful. Last night’s perfectly focused singing of the final section must surely have convinced everyone that the Angels were indeed receiving us In Paradisum.