VoxCarnyx

St John’s Kirk, Perth

The most unchanged and regularly used venue in the half century of the Perth Festival of the Arts is also roughly contemporaneous with some of the music often heard there, the a cappella singing of the great Renaissance composers.

The opening concert of this year’s festival at St John’s was by a choir making its debut at the festival, Ora Singers, but the shape of the repertoire they brought was familiar enough to fill the kirk, mixing that repertoire with some of the recent flowering of new music for the same forces. It was an evening not without glitches – and congratulations to the choir’s manager for eventually identifying the user of the rogue whistling hearing aid – but it had a reassuring format with some nice original touches.

Choir director Suzi Digby’s vigorous conducting style and crystal-clear beat speaks of her long experience. That rhythmic control of her singers was especially apparent in a bracingly fresh reading of Palestrina’s Assumpta est Maria and in the rhythmic complexities of Mark Simpson’s Ave Maria.

Many of the new works had early music partners – Victoria’s Ave Maria preceding the Simpson, and David Bednall’s Assumpta following the Palestrina – but the newest, Electra Perivolaris’s An end without end, commissioned for the choir by the Duke of Buccleuch in memory of his late wife and setting words from Scots poet William Drummond’s A Cypress Grove, stood apart in both text and structure. If afforded a unique opportunity to hear the voices in the choir combine in duet, trio and quartet.

There were step-out solos throughout, of course, with one of the tenors especially impressive, and in ensemble it was the men who particularly shone, from rich bass sonorities to the single male among the altos. At other times the choir did divide, a sextet performing Cecilia McDowell’s Alma Redemptoris Mater, and the opening performance of Allegri’s Miserere including responses from singers not among those who processed around the audience.

The soaring soprano among those invisible voices was an early warning that some of the intonation was not always quite as precise as it should have been, but the theatre of the performance often made up for that.

Thankfully the sopranos sounded much more secure on Sir James MacMillan’s Miserere, closing the recital and completing the reflective nature of the programme. Fine though many of the other newer pieces were, it is a masterwork and there was really no following it.

Keith Bruce