VoxCarnyx

City Halls, Glasgow

Some members of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus doubtless sang Hector Berlioz’s L’Enfance du Christ under the baton of Emmanuel Krivine when the SCO last performed the oratorio in Glasgow City Halls almost a decade ago – but equally many of the current cohort of singers will have been tackling the work for the first time. It is surely that constant process of renewal, under chorus director Gregory Batsleer (who has just extended his contract with the choir), that makes the SCO Chorus so special.

It was on its finest form for this concert, making The Shepherds’ Farewell, the best known music of the score, sound newly-minted, its luscious harmony delivered with ideal balance and precision, and then exceeding that achievement with the closing a cappella hymn, surely some of the finest and most perfectly calibrated singing ever heard in this venerable venue.

It included two sopranos singing from outside the choir stalls door and tenor soloist Andrew Staples moving from the front of the stage below to behind the choir to deliver his contribution. If the quieter elements of all this were daringly demanding of the silent attentiveness of the audience, the chorus of offstage Angels at the end of Part One  delivering their ethereal Hosannas had already prepared the ears.

Batsleer and conductor Maxim Emelyanychev had evidently planned the delivery of Berlioz’s theatrical music very carefully, and that extended to the instrumentalists as well, not just Michael Bawtree’s harmonium, located somewhere invisible alongside the women of the chorus.

The composer’s own libretto adds  a lot to the bare bones of Mary and Joseph’s flight to Egypt as it is recounted in the Bible, with the encounter between Herod (Callum Thorpe) and the Soothsayers (the men of the choir) owing much to the one between Macbeth and the Witches. Much of the narrative of the work is in the music, with that section, for example, using a superb combination of low strings, natural horn and bassoon.

All of these details could not have been clearer under the conductor’s meticulous direction, and nor could the architecture of the piece, with the odd-time-signatured ritual music of those mystics in Part One mirrored by the instrumental interlude of home-making in Part Three. Typical of Emelyanychev, the maestro took a chair amongst his string players to enjoy the pastoral trio that followed from flautists Claire Wickes and Carolina Patricio and Eleanor Hudson’s harp.

The vocal soloists, then, had to be content to share much of the spotlight that usually falls on them, but their contributions were of equally high standard. Roderick Williams set the standard for French diction with his animated Polydorus before becoming a more sedate Joseph, while Paula Murrihy’s Mary was radiant, with just the right measure of anxiety.

Keith Bruce

Picture of Paula Murrihy by Barbara Aumuller