Choir of King's College, Cambridge REVIEW

The Choir of King's College, Cambridge, England

Stephen Cleobury - Director of Music

Peter Stevens and Tom Kimber - Organ Scholars

Friday, April 4, 2008

This review is By Philip Barnes, Artistic Director of the Saint Louis Chamber Chorus.

You have to hand it to Stephen Cleobury, he demonstrates the best of musical taste in his repertoire, panders little to the audience, and knows how to train young boys (a.k.a. 'trebles') to sing with accuracy and expression.  It cannot be easy to direct such a renowned ensemble for whom expectations are always high, let alone one whose recordings are a fixed benchmark, even those from the 1950's.  In fact, a comparison of those discs made with Boris Ord, and subsequent ones with his successors David Willcocks and Philip Ledger, is instructive for how this choir has grown.  If Willcocks fashioned a seamless blend, and Ledger added some vitality, Cleobury has maintained elements of these but stretched the choir in terms of repertoire.  As he remarked to the St. Louis audience, contemporary music has always been a passion, and the King's tradition of commissioning a new piece each year for the Festival of Nine Lessons & Carols has enabled him to maintain an element of freshness that contributes to that service's enduring appeal.

The most recent of these commissions is "Now Comes the Dawn" by the Australian Brett Dean (b. 1961), who spent many years in the viola section of the Berlin Philharmonic before concentrating on composition.  Its structure is basically AABA, though the recapitulation is embellished with a fragmentary solo from a treble.  The main music idea sees a unison note that gradually acquires notes clustered around it, and the idea of an unfolding chord suits the verse "Stardust and vaporous light,/the mist of worlds born."  The climax, in the B section, describes the birth of Christ, and here the music was more discordant than ecstatic.  Frankly, the lyrics, by the 19th century American writer Richard Watson Gilder, would merit further musical treatment, but all credit to Dean for finding such a fine text.

This recent work provided a bridge between two French works, the former an organ solo and the latter a cycle of four Christmas motets by Francis Poulenc.  These focus on various aspects of the Adoration, from the beasts to the shepherds to the wise men, and culminate in a paean for Christmas Day, "Hodie Christus Natus Est."  These are among the most familiar works by Poulenc, and they've been heard in St. Louis sung by many different choirs, from the Symphony Chorus to various chamber and church choirs.  Cleobury's reading was direct and no nonsense, the pitch remained true throughout, other than an odd moment in the third "Videntes Stellam".  The soft passages were soft, and the loud loud.  The awkward vocal lines (that Poulenc was largely self-taught in formal harmony is apparent to any singer) were tossed off with nary a care.  The other French piece, a movement from Olivier Messiaen's "Meditations sur le Mystere de la Sainte Trinite," was nimbly played by Tom Kimber, who made good use of the different registers the mighty Kilgen organ has to offer.  Thanks to the interpolation of plainchant with bird song, there were many contrasts in Messiaen's writing.  Perhaps too many, since this was too long a solo to be heard so early in the programme.

Nonetheless, initially it was something of a relief, following the opening set of early 17th century anthems from England that were more unsettling than satisfying.  The first music heard at any performance often sets the tone for the whole programme, so it was disconcerting to hear three works that should be the backbone of the King's repertoire sung untidily.  In a choir of this caliber there are no bad singers, but one does not expect individual voices to be so discernible.  That failing, and Cleobury's perfunctory tempi, suggested that the choir had not effectively rehearsed and adapted to such an unusually capacious acoustic as the basilica offers. The speed of "Alleluia! I Heard A Voice" would be fine for composer Thomas Weelkes' cathedral at Chichester; likewise Thomas Tomkins' "When David Heard" at Worcester, and Orlando Gibbons' "O Clap Your Hands" in King's chapel itself.  But this was none of these; this was the St. Louis Cathedral-Basilica, and if the result was a muddle by the tenth row from the front, heaven knows what it must have sounded like further back!

Other selections fared better in the challenging resonance.  The Poulenc motets were effective, as was Bach's double choir motet, "Komm, Jesu, Komm," whose use of rests and pauses allowed the music to 'breathe' in the space.  This is quite a challenge for such young voices, but they accomplished it with aplomb.  Cleobury drew adequate phrasing though one suspects he could do more with the more mature voices of the BBC Singers, the other British choir that he has conducted regularly.  Their timbre was what was needed for the final work on the programme, "Valiant-For-Truth," a setting from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" that Vaughan Williams composed for a choir of men and women in London's dark days of 1941.  Cleobury wisely reassigned the alto recitatives to the trebles; male altos can sound ghastly on these exposed (and high) passages.  However, this piece did not quite realize its magical possibilities, though the crescendo for the repeated phrase "and all the trumpets sounded for him" was stepped admirably.

Before the Vaughan Williams were the finest three pieces on the programme; this was what we had come to hear, and there could have been no disappointment in the works by Bruhns, Berkeley and Howells.  First, Peter Stevens provided an object lesson in articulation and registration with his playing of Nicolaus Bruhns' "Praeludium in E" - it is a somber but grand work, and complemented the acoustic instead of combating it.  Then, by way of delightful contrast, the exquisite, almost Bluesy "The Lord Is My Shepherd" by Lennox Berkeley, which showed that the organ could accompany the choir effectively (it had not done so in the earlier works by Weelkes and Gibbons).  Cleobury reminisced that Berkeley's two sons had been in the Westminster Cathedral Choir when he was Master of the Choristers there, prior to his Cambridge appointment.  This work was written for the intimate space of Chichester Cathedral, however, yet it worked quite will in the basilica, and featured one of those superb treble soloists synonymous with King's.  Finally, the highlight of the evening, the glorious and enthralling motet dedicated "to the honoured memory of John Fitzgerald Kennedy" by English composer, Herbert Howells.  This is one of his greatest works, commissioned for an American-Canadian service of remembrance in Washington, D.C., just months after J.F.K.'s assassination.  The words, "Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing," Howells had used as a literary preface to his other masterpiece, the "Hymnus Paradisi" of 1950, written in memory of his only son, Michael.  Once again, when he exalted and lamented the dead president, he wrote from the heart and created an achingly beautiful piece.

The harmonic language of the Kennedy motet is quintessentially English, and it is therefore an ideal choice for a choir such as King's; its American inspiration only strengthened its appropriateness to Friday's programme.  The text is taken from Prudentius (348 - 413 A.D.), in a remarkable translation of medieval Latin lyrics published in 1929 by Helen Waddell.  The same collection included a tenth century poem, "Angelic Host," and this spurred Howells' contemporary, Michael Tippett, to track down the Latin original for a commission he received from Canterbury Cathedral in 1943.  This piece, "Plebs Angelica," scored for double choir, was sung as an encore at Friday night's performance, and provided an austere and understated conclusion to an evening of contrast and competence.  At their best, the performers from King's College had shown their true colours, but the challenges of the building will probably have left them remembering St. Louis as much as we will remember their musicianship and the magnificent Howells.