Choir to melt stoniest hearts - 2.07.08

[Concert Review – Merchant Taylors Hall, London / City of London Festival] Barry Millington, Evening Standard – 01 July 2008

Unaccompanied choral music may not be everybody’s idea of heaven but when the music is as imaginatively selected as this, and the choir as egregiously flawless as Tenebrae, the repertoire ought to win over the stoniest hearts.

In fact, parts of the programme, including the opening Neue Liebeslieder Walzer by Brahms, were accompanied by two pianos (the excellent Joseph Cullen and Jeremy Filsell). Tenebrae, directed by Nigel Short, has more than its fair share of solo potential, and several of its members took the limelight with aplomb.

Picking up one of the thematic threads of this year’s City of London Festival – namely Switzerland – Short’s own new work, Rhenus Fluvius, seeks out the source of the Rhine high in the Swiss Alps.

Jurg M Frankhauser’s text draws on the Romanch dialect, as well as Latin and German. French, Middle High German and Dutch are promised for later sections.

The verse bubbles and gushes like the river itself, while Short’s setting, at first reluctant to settle for obvious word-painting, finally achieves its own organic synthesis of line and colour.

The Mass for Double Choir by the Swiss composer Frank Martin, one of the masterpieces of the genre, was given a thrilling performance, the poignancy of its entreaties and the potency of its acclamations heard to tremendous effect in the Sanctus.

Motets by Brahms and a group of Schubert pieces were delivered with the impeccable intonation and stylistic authority that mark out Tenebrae as one of the country’s most outstanding vocal ensembles.