VoxCarnyx

Usher Hall, Edinburgh

Composer John Tavener considered the eight-hour choral epic The Veil of the Temple to be his supreme achievement, presumably for more than just its epic duration. Its second ever complete performance ended with the full forces of the Edinburgh Festival Chorus, Monteverdi Choir, and National Youth Choir of Scotland on the Usher Hall platform and lower reaches of the choir stalls chanting the Sanskrit mantra of Peace, “Om Shanti”.

The conductor who had magnificently held the entire performance together, Sofi Jeannin, even allowed herself to join in and let her energetic arms rest.

Backstage stories suggest that the journey to that moment was not always peaceful and Jeannin’s achievement even more impressive than it appeared from an audience perspective, and it is to be hoped that the conductor, who directed the Dunedin Consort’s St Matthew Passion in Easter 2024, now becomes part of team EIF, an ad-hoc company evident in the line-up for this event.

As well as its own chorus, the Festival’s sole staff musicians – excepting current director Nicola Benedetti – and celebrating their 60^th birthday this year, that team always features the young singers of NYCOS, who have shown themselves capable of rising to any challenge the EIF throws their way.

We should also include Puerto Rican soprano Sophia Burgos, also an essential ingredient of last year’s opening concert La Pasion segun San Marcos, and here the promenading soprano whose arias, in tandem with the duduk of Hovhannes Margaryan, began each section of the work.

The transformation of the Usher Hall into a believable religious sanctuary rather than a concert hall was the work of Thomas Guthrie, singer and violin player as well as a director, and a crucial front-line member of the Alehouse Sessions band that gave a memorable “beanbag” concert at EIF 2024.

The most striking element of Guthrie’s staging was a stepped altar in the midst of those stalls beanbags, which bore candles indicating the progress through the eight “cycles” of the composition and on and around which the Monteverdi Choir and its step-out soloists performed. Beyond that, however, Guthrie placed singers just about anywhere they might feasibly go so that solo voices and choirs popped up amongst every section of the audience and sounded hauntingly off-stage from the foyer spaces – as well as sometimes entirely filling those choir stalls.

Whether his efforts, and Tavener’s music, translated into a spiritual experience rather than a durational one, is perhaps debatable. As the structure of the work revealed itself – those cycles revisiting the same material in incrementally changing ways as the forces involved built and the pitch rose, a tone at time – its predictability was not always a blessing. And although some of the choral music was sumptuous, the deliberate mono-tonal simplicity of much of the solo parts was a challenge.

In fairness, it was one to which the Monteverdi soloists rose bravely and effectively. Soprano Theano Papadaki and tenor Hugo Hymas delivered the work’s repeating sequence of beatitudes with passion, and bass-baritone Florian Stortz was superb with the Passion-tide Gospel utterances of Christ. A trio of resonant basses – Tristan Hambleton, Richard Weigold and Rob Macdonald – were as mobile in their solo appearances as Burgos.

Special mention should also go to the tenor soloist from the Festival Chorus, David Lee, who featured in the only section, Cycle 4, which did not include the Monteverdi Choir.

Like him, the player of the Usher Hall organ, David Goodenough, was unidentified in the programme. His drone note was the first sound of the afternoon, and for much of the performance that was all that he was required to do, but the full might of the instrument was heard at the end, when brass, horns and timpani from the RSNO also came into play. For the most part, the orchestra’s principal percussionist Simon Lowden and his section colleagues added the crucial spare instrumental ingredients, alongside specialists on Tibetan temple horn and Indian harmonium.

There was scarcely a note of these sonic details that the conductor did not precisely cue, but even more impressive was the attention Jeannin gave to the three choirs, no matter where they were singing from. The balance she achieved – in which it was still possible to appreciate their individual strengths – was truly remarkable.

It would have been asking too much for the choral performance to be flawless, but it was never less than excellent. This edition of the Monteverdi Choir, now directed by Jonathan Sells, sounded more admirable for the character of the individual voices within it than its ensemble sound, but its own Usher Hall concert may prove a better guide to that. Under the direction of James Grossmith, the Edinburgh Festival Chorus sings in a very precise and measured way and its quietest moments here were the most impressive.

There is a great deal of demanding rhythmic complexity in the vocal score of The Veil of the Temple, as well as a lot of music at the very top of the soprano range. In both these areas, it was the young singers of the National Youth Choir that delivered the goods beyond all reasonable expectation of their experience. Prepared by NYCOS founder Christopher Bell and directed by Mark Evans, this year’s cohort have already matched the huge contribution their predecessors have made to recent Festival programmes, with more opportunities to hear them in Festival and Fringe to come.

Keith Bruce

Pictures: Sofi Jeannin by Patrick Allen; Florian Stortz by Andrew Perry