'exemplary performances, lucid, and so commanding' - 28.06.07

[Concert Review: City of London Festival, Merchant Taylor Hall] Andrew Clements, The Guardian ****

All things French dominate the schedule of this year’s City of London festival, as it continues its theme of programmes focusing on the capital’s major trading partners. Tenebrae’s concert, under the title Music of Religious and Revolutionary France, juxtaposed works from the 13th and 14th centuries with two from the middle of the 20th.

It is a very special choir that can sing Machaut and Pérotin as convincingly as it tackles Duruflé and Poulenc. But Tenebrae are special. Directed by Nigel Short, these were exemplary performances, lucid, and so commanding it seemed as if singing perfectly in tune was the most natural thing in the world. Machaut’s La Messe de Nostre Dame, famous as the earliest known setting of the complete liturgy by a single composer, was a marvel of vocal technique, its florid decoration and harmonies crisply articulated, just as the four-part layering of Pérotin’s Viderunt Omnes was crystal clear.

Maurice Duruflé’s Quatre Motets sur des Thèmes Gregoriens, permeated by plainchant, provided the connection between the medieval and modern worlds. Interleaving organ music – pieces by Titelouze, Litaize, Duruflé, and Dupré, played by Jeremy Filsell – between the movements of the Machaut and Pérotin was not the greatest idea, even if it did give an airing to the rather fine organ in the Merchant Taylors’ Hall.

At least the movements of Poulenc’s massive motet Figure Humaine were not interrupted in the same way. This setting of Paul Eluard’s great paean to freedom, composed in occupied France in 1943, is one of the century’s great choral works, and a daunting undertaking for any chorus. But Tenebrae’s performance was thrillingly secure, with enough energy left for an encore, Messiaen’s Sacrum Convivium.