REVIEWS
VERDI 'S REQUIEM AT THE GRAND CANAL THEATRE. – 02/04/2011
Reviewed by Pat O’Kelly (published -THE IRISH INDEPENDENT - Wednesday 6 April 2011)
It may seem incongruous to celebrate the 300th anniversary of Trinity College’s related disciplines of Medicine, Chemistry and Botany with a requiem. However, Verdi’s 1860s masterpiece happens to correspond to a golden age in TCD’s medical department.
The occasion finds the Guinness Choir joining forces with the University’s own Choral Society and the Ulster Orchestra in a spectacular array of almost 300 performers at the Grand Canal Theatre.
The Guinness involvement also reflects the brewing family’s support of TCD through endowments of one kind or another over the centuries.
Turning the theatre into a concert hall for the event shows the flexibility of its acoustic. Under David Milne’s direction, orchestra and choristers sound wonderfully clear with engaging instrumental detail a salient feature of the performance.
The merged choral forces’ articulation is also surprisingly lucid with their soft singing producing a gently restrained quality. More flamboyant outbursts - ‘Tuba mirum’, with its spatially located trumpets, and ‘Libera me’ for example – provide exciting components.
The evening’s solo quartet presents variable results. Soprano Judith O’Brien scales Verdi’s lofty heights and plunges to his darker recesses while bass Simon Bailey is consistently expressive and musical.
Mezzo Emma Selway needs more vocal heft to accommodate Verdi’s stentorian demands with tenor Robert Chapin veering towards the bland rather than the colourful. Unaccompanied ensembles stumble in a minefield of suspect intonation.
The Requiem is preceded by a lacklustre account of Borodin’s exotic ‘Prince Igor’ overture. A contemporary of Verdi, the Russian composer merits his place here through his St Petersburg professorship of chemistry.
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Tuesday21st April 2009
Soloists Guinness Choir
and orchestra/Milne
St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
Michael Dungan
Handel - Solomon
Solomon, composed in 1748, came about seven oratorios after Messiah and fourth from the end. In three, upstaged acts gives it a portrait chiefly of the Old Testament figure of King Solomon but also of the Golden Age over which he presided.
Aside from the central Act II episode – the famous story of how Solomon proposes cutting a baby in half to resolve a maternity dispute - there is little external drama or narrative. So as a piece of music it is concerned with pomp and pageantry, rejoicing and adulation. Handel specialist Winton Dean argues that Handel intended - and his audiences appreciated - a deliberate analogy with England’s reigning sovereign of the time, George II.
So how exactly are we to take two and a half hours of empire, prosperity and monarchy here in our recession-battered republic? Easy – it’s a Handel in top gear.
Crowning the Guinness Choir’s welcome presentation of a great oratorio that has been sidelined by the perennial popularity' of the Messiah was mezzo-soprano Alison Browner. She sang the central “trouser role” of Solomon with default settings of an exquisite calibre, her invisible multi-tasking making every note beautiful while investing each word with meaning.
There were fine offerings from soprano Olive Simpson as the Queen of Sheba, her ease and sweetness growing the higher the register, and from bass John Milne, noble but unmannered as the priestly Levite. Tenor Christopher Brown and soprano Róisín O’Grady were polished, clear and stylish their solos, with O’Grady bringing an additional element of drama as one of the maternity-case mothers.
Interestingly, the other mother was sung with great dynamism and musical shaping by soprano Nicola Mahoney, but with a vocal colour laced with timbres from a wholly different style of singing, perhaps jazz or pop.
Overseeing all the pomp and emotion was conductor David Milne who, though his strings couldn't always deliver perfect cohesion, drew from his players great animation and character, yielding more than the sum of their parts.
Likewise the Guinness Choir itself, while losing definition and energy to weak consonants, gave Milne all the character he sought, above all in the great choruses of celebration.
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Wednesday 16th April 2008
Guinness Choir and Orchestra/Milne NCH, Dublin
MICHAEL DUNGAN
There was a double dose of impressive artistic courage in the Guinness Choir's choice of programme for its spring concert. First, the choir confronted the Irish collective blind spot for English composers. Big names such as Brinen and Elgar are rarely programmed here, with composers from the next tier down - such as Gerald Finzi - rarer still. A choir would be reckoned brave for devoting half a programme to one of these and the other half to a sure thing. The Guinness Choir, risking box-office woes, went English all the way.
Second, the two pieces - Finzi's Wordsworth sterling "Intimations of Immortality" and Britten's celebration of the end of winter, the Spring Symphony - present considerable challenges to the choir, being unfamiliar and hard to learn.
Artistic courage was certainly vindicated on the first count, with the English programme drawing close to a full house. The outcome on the second count was more mixed. There is a huge amount of singing in both works, and the choir's valiant focus on getting all notes and entries right took a heavy toll on basics such as vowel sounds, which lost their quality, and enunciation of consonants, which was mostly weak, obscuring the text and undermining rhythmic vitality. These were not issues for the young choristers of the Palestrina Choir, whose singing was technically disciplined as well as pure and spirited.
The choir was at its best in big homophonic passages such as the tenth section of the Finzi, when it brought a real spirit of celebration to Wordsworth's delight in nature, and in Milton's 'The Morning Star" in the Britten.
Soprano Charlotte Ellett - standing in for the indisposed Julie Moffat - and mezzo Emma Selway were insightful in Britten's sampling of five centuries of English poets from Robert Herrick to W.H. Auden. In contrast, tenor Martyn Hill, who sang in both works, was remote and disengaged, almost void of any communicative value.
Conductor David Milne drew much fine playing from the orchestra, establishing a brooding, deeper-than-nostalgic wistfulness from the Finzi. Showcased instruments, such as the horn in the Finzi and the harps and trumpets in the Britten, were all very strong.
This was probably the Britten symphony's first Irish performance, almost 60 years on, for which the choir received financial support from the Britten-Pears Foundation.
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“SPIRITED ADVENTURE ON A SPRING OUTING”
The Guinness Choir
National Concert Hall
By programming Gerald Finzi's “Intimations Of Immortality” and Benjamin Britten’s “Spring” Symphony, the Guinness Choir showed spirited adventure for their spring outing at the National Concert Hall.
Both works are settings of English verse. Finzi took extracts from Wordsworth's “Recollections Of Childhood” while Britten’s 14 poets read like a “Golden Treasury”. Considered his masterpiece, Finzi’s “Intimations” is beautifully scored with music following a line from Elgar through Holst to Walton. His writing can be solemnly reflective and joyously chirpy, with elements of pastoral and pageant.
Britten’s “Spring” Symphony is more extrovert, but, like the Finzi, has its longueurs. Deftly scored, it has remarkable originality not least in the vibrant string support of the tenor's “Waters Above” (Vaughan) and the brass and percussion in the alto’s “Out On The lawn I Lie In bed” (Auden).
If the Finzi seems to enjoy the safer performance under David Milne, its demands are less fastidious. The Britten needs a tighter rein to ensure its myriad detail is crystal clear - not by any means a simple task. The Guinness voices are never less than stalwart in both pieces, while the boys of the Palestrina Choir, essential to the Britten, are nonetheless swamped in their important finale “Sumer Is A Icomin In” as the larger group’s vocals swayed ecstatically.
The lion’s share of the solos goes to tenor Martyn Hill, whose response was delicately and positively expressive. Alto Emma Selway was robust against the somewhat edgy soprano Charlotte Ellett.
PAT O'KELLY
14th April 2008