'ideal setting for the extraordinary singing of Tenebrae' - 1.10.07

[Concert Review – St Augustine’s Church, Penarth, Vale of Glamorgan Festival] Rian Evans, The Guardian, 11 Sept 2007

St Augustine’s may not be an ancient church but, with decorative brickwork worthy of a Byzantine interior and an acoustic to match, it was an ideal setting for the extraordinary singing of Nigel Short’s Tenebrae as part of the Vale of Glamorgan festival.

The church’s acoustic also allowed Tenebrae to indulge their instinct for theatricality. John Tavener’s opening Song for Athene had a processional element, while his Hymn to the Mother of God found the singers on either side of the audience. The sensation was of being caught up in waves of sound. The music of the Portuguese-based composer Ivan Moody sat well enough alongside that of Tavener and the Georgian Giya Kancheli, though its effect was sometimes discomfiting. Moody’s espousal of medieval sonorities was countered by acidly etched dissonances, yet the selfconsciousness of the process tended to undermine its impact.

By contrast, it was the unself-conscious simplicity of Howard Skempton’s The Song of Songs that made it effective. Similarly, in Ross Edwards’ Mountain Chant, the central chorus, intoning the names of the mountainous dreaming sites of the indigenous people of Australia, had a natural rhythmic vibrancy reinforced by handclapping.

The message of Kancheli’s Amao Omi is the futility of war, and his juxtaposition of the timbre of saxophone quartet with chorus ought to have been potent. But moments of tantalising beauty were either aborted or dissipated in the flights of saccharine banality to which Kancheli seems to resort. With lesser exponents than Tenebrae and the Raschèr Quartet, the half-hour span could have seemed interminable.