VoxCarnyx

St Cuthbert’s, Edinburgh

With a concert of Christmas music next month before its annual Messiah in the Usher Hall, the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union is a busy choir over the coming weeks. The headline work in this concert was Brahms’ German Requiem, but it was preceded by two pieces that spoke of a venerable 166-year-old institution far from content to rest on its laurels (and that perennially popular New Year event).

The first half began with a nod to the current season of Remembrance with Charles Villiers Stanford’s dramatic anthem For lo, I raise up, setting Old Testament verses from Habakkuk. Employing soprano and tenor soloists from within the ranks, it was conducted by the ERCU’s current conducting fellow, Fraser David Macdonald, a master’s student at the University of Edinburgh who later took his place with the tenors. The choir seemed much more comfortable with the hymn for peace that forms the second half of the work than the turbulent condemnation of the warmongers with which it opens, but it was an effective warm-up for everything that followed.

The fascinating gem of the programme – afforded a pre-concert introductory talk – was Ronald Center’s Dona Nobis Pacem. The chamber music of the self-taught 20^th century Aberdeenshire composer has recently been explored on disc by pianist Christopher Guild and RSNO violinist Tamas Fejes with his quartet, but this post-WW2 call for reconciliation, setting Walt Whitman and 19^th century Quaker politician John Bright alongside Biblical texts (borrowing much of that from Vaughan Williams) was a rare and bold challenge.

Center’s instrumental scoring for piano, organ, timpani and side drum makes for an arresting combination but it never overshadows the choir, although the piano part in particular is virtuosic and full of interest. It is  a tricky sing, varying widely in style, but the “Choral” met the challenge head-on. Again from the ranks, tenor Timothy Coleman was the soloist in the Britten-esque Reconciliation second movement, while final year undergraduate at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Caspian Plummer, made a fine case for the Bright-setting The Angel of Death as a stand-alone art song with Anna Michels’ piano accompaniment.

She and writer and broadcaster James Naughtie, who was a childhood pupil of Center, provided the introductory talk and genuine insight into the man and his music, before the chorus made the best case for its performance with their ensemble in the third movement Dirge for two veterans (the timpani rhythm close kin to the second movement of the Brahms), and in the moving Agnus Dei with which the work ends.

It set up the Requiem after the interval, which Naughtie had recalled hearing Center conduct for the Huntly Choral Society. As with the Dona Nobis Pacem, Michael Bawtree, ERCU chorus director of almost 20 years standing, was now on the podium and doing a very fine job of balancing his disparate forces, the women’s voices far out-numbering the men.

Plummer returned as baritone soloist, demonstrating good German diction and even tone across his range, while soprano Sophie Bysouth, also from the RCS, brought drama to the gospel opening of the fifth movement even if her intonation was a little uneven.

As with the concert’s opening work, the chorus was at its best in the more mellifluous music, while some of the accents in the score, notably in the opening movement and in the pealing lines at the end of Psalm 84’s “amiable tabernacles”, often needed more stress.

Another revelation of the evening was the effectiveness of Iain Farrington’s chamber reduction of the orchestral score, the keyboards and kettle-drums joined by four strings and three winds. The players’ hard work produced a remarkable sound from such a small team.

Keith Bruce

Picture: Ronald Center