VoxCarnyx

St John’s Kirk, Perth

The members  of VOCES8 are too young (even sole original one, Barnaby Smith) to remember, but during their early ascendancy, The Beatles’ songwriting skills were favourably compared with those of Franz Schubert by the music critic of The Times.

So it was a nice conceit to bracket the German composer’s 1822 Schiller-setting Liebe, sung by four male voices from the octet, with a sextet version of Free As A Bird, the John Lennon song which the other Fab Four unearthed to add to the first volume of the Anthology reissues in 1995.

The segue was, however, one of only two sequences that survived from this small chamber choir’s planned programme, the other being the pairing of their equally well-known version of Kate Rusby’s Underneath the Stars and Joshua Pacey’s more recent arrangement of Danny Boy.

The recital they gave was an interesting answer to the question baritone Christopher Moore told us they are often asked: what does such a small unaccompanied group of singers do if one of their number is not in tip-top health.

Here it was one of the sopranos who took as limited a part as possible in the proceedings, and the repertoire was adjusted to take account for that. The result was an evening that leaned much more on the lighter side of the VOCES8 back catalogue.

It was a little briefer, but no less coherent, although the concert’s title, Give Me Your Stars, became a nonsense as it was taken from young composer Lucy Walker’s setting of words by American poet Sarah Teasdale, which, like Stardust by the ensemble’s composer-in-residence Taylor Scott Davis, we never heard.

But if those contemporary works written for the group were missing, the complexities of Renaissance polyphony were still there in the opening Regina Caeli by Victoria and William Byrd’s Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles and devotional music still ended the first half with Holst’s Nunc Dimittis now preceded by Bobby McFerrin’s reworking of The 23^rd Psalm and Arvo Part’s The Deer’s Cry, both masterpieces of elegant simplicity.

Apart from Eric Whitacre’s All Seems Beautiful to Me, and a very brief taste of Ward Swingle’s Bach at the start of the second half, the rest of the music was more pop, but brilliantly arranged and sung. The octet’s fondness for combining two songs in one featured in Jim Clements’ version of Bond themes For Your Eyes Only and You Only Live Twice, and Alexander L’Estrange’s of Fly Me To The Moon and Come Fly With Me.

The latter sat in the middle of the ensemble’s closing “jazz” sequence, which was really nothing of the kind as every note was precisely notated and rehearsed in the fine arrangements: of improvisation, there was none.

It is the detail of those settings that always fascinates. VOCES8 contributed their singular sound to Paul Simon’s most recent album, Seven Psalms, which explained the inclusion of Australian Naomi Crellin’s arrangement of Homeward Bound. In amongst its complexities it was still possible to hear the original harmonies of the Simon and Garfunkel hit properly given their place.

Keith Bruce

Picture by Andy Staples