SCO / Manze
Usher Hall, Edinburgh
Faure’s Requiem is a popular choice for amateur choirs: not too long and requiring limited contributions from just two soloists, it is very often heard with organ or piano accompaniment. Predictably, the honed precision of the SCO Chorus, as prepared by director Gregory Batsleer, was in another league altogether, but it was the partnership with the orchestra itself that made this a revelatory performance.
Faure’s spare orchestration, completed a decade after the work’s composition, is substantially in the hands of the low strings, so SCO Principal Guest Conductor Andrew Manze had the orchestra re-positioned with principal viola Jessica Beeston in the orchestra leader’s seat opposite first cello Su-a Lee, and the violins centre stage but further back.
The effect was crucial aurally as well as visually, the front stage musicians’ combination with horns and organ in the Introit emphasising the movement’s affinity with early music, and the entry of the harp and violins in the Sanctus answered by the lovely counterpoint line given to the violas. For the Pie Jesu that followed, soprano Julia Doyle sang from high in the organ gallery, and the pizzicato cellos and basses in the Libera Me seemed absolutely essential to the anguish of the baritone’s plea for deliverance.
That soloist was Roderick Williams, and the conductor had also put his participation in an excellent broader context. If Gabriel Faure brought something of an outsider’s eye to the rituals of the Catholic church, that perspective could also be detected in everything else in the concert.
Berlioz’s devotion to Shakespeare – albeit in the person of one actress in particular – still seems odd for a man with limited command of the English language, but his Overture, Beatrice and Benedict, is unmistakably a work of the theatre. The combinations of wind instruments were a sparkling part of his dramatic narrative.
Then it was the turn of the SCO strings to shine in music from a century later, and an Essex woman’s impressions of the Lake District. The SCO is in the vanguard of championing the neglected Ruth Gipps and her Cringlemire Garden both harks back to the architectural era of the country house of its title and shows the influence of her teacher, Vaughan Williams, whose own composition of exactly that time – the beginning of the 20th century – followed.
His Five Mystical Songs set the Christian lyrics of early 17th century metaphysical poet and priest George Herbert, and Williams and the SCO Chorus found the sort of respectful distance to the words that the composer surely intended. The best-known of the five is the choral closer, entitled Antiphon, but familiar from its couplet “Let the world in every corner sing, My God and King!” That hymn and the opener, Easter, bracket more personal statements of faith, the central “Love bade me welcome” perhaps the loveliest.
The way Vaughan Williams combines soloist and choir is full of interest and invention, with wordless underscores as well as the fuller choral writing, and Williams is a superb interpreter of this music.
Keith Bruce
Portrait of Roderick Williams by Theo Williams