VoxCarnyx

Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Glasgow

Chamber choir The Marian Consort were at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland to mentor vocal studies and composition students before their Friday lunchtime concert, and there can also have been few among the audience in the well-filled Stevenson Hall who left without learning something.

Not only did Rory McCleery’s group give a masterclass in performing 16^th century scores, with some appropriate contemporary works in the mix, but their founder and director kept us up to speed with the latest thinking on the music of the era in genial style. This was a very thoughtfully compiled programme that included works written half a millennium apart which spoke eloquently to one another.

If Scotland’s much-vaunted Auld Alliance with France means anything at all, here was the sonic evidence, unaccompanied singing, sourced from manuscripts found in Scotland, that mixed native composers with those who worked in France: Josquin de Prez, Johannes Lupi and Notre Dame choirboy Pierre Certon.

All three of those, and much of the anonymous music alongside, were in praise of, or from the mouth of, the Virgin Mary, by way of justifying the consort’s name, but of even greater interest was the way in which they musically drew on one another, or demonstrated a shared inspiration. That there was a vibrant trade in musical ideas between the two countries seemed unarguable, even if it was the interweaving complexity of the individual parts in the French music that was the more sophisticated.

The octet found space to make the case for simplicity as well, however. The inclusion of the post-Reformation setting of Psalm 150 by David Peebles, with its instantly-recognisable four-part metric harmony, showed that the era also shaped the sound of Scottish worship for the next four hundred years.

That prolific composer’s present day successors are free to range across languages as well as tenets of faith and Phillip Cooke’s Canticum Mariae Virginis alternates choral singing in Latin with a solo soprano singing words from the Magnificat in Scots, to mesmerizing effect. Just as compelling was the contribution of current RCS doctorate student Kenneth Tay, whose Duo Seraphim for double choir makes inspired use of bell-like whistling as counterpoint to the Latin text, initially by the men in the choir and finally by conductor McCleery himself.

All of which ostensibly left no room for the best known of Scotland’s living composers of sacred music, James McMillan, although advance publicity had promised its inclusion. But if devotees of Sir James were feeling short-changed, the encore answered their prayers.

Emerging from among the audience – as had an off-stage tenor singing plainchant earlier in the recital – 20 RCS voice students expanded McCleery’s choir for the hit tune from MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, O Radiant Dawn. There was no following that.

Keith Bruce

Portrait of Rory McCleery by Kristina Allen