SCO Chorus/Batsleer
Great Hall, Stirling Castle
As chorus director and conductor Gregory Batsleer pointed out, the performers on stage in the restored, if slightly jaded, splendour of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle have an excellent view to the National Wallace Monument and the Ochil Hills which matched the heaven and skywards theme of most of the works he had programmed.
He conceded, however, that the audience is not in the same privileged position, so it was down to the choir to communicate that. Thankfully the SCO Chorus is capable of reaching heights other ensembles can only aspire to.
The two newest works in the programme were, perhaps, furthest from that theme as well as closest to home. Andrew Carvel is a tenor in the choir as well as a composer and wrote his setting of Psalm 150, which lists a suggested instrumentation for the Lord’s Praise, for a BBC broadcast from St Andrew’s and St George’s Church in Edinburgh. With its fluxing music, it is recognisably hymn-like, but a long way from congregational.
The SCO’s current Associate Composer, Jay Capperauld, contributed a setting of a contemporary poem by Fife-based Niall Campbell. The Night Watch is about the joyous sleeplessness of caring for a newborn, a sort of inverse lullaby which Capperauld has set to use the individual and sectional talents of the choir, especially the pure-toned sopranos.
Less than a month after the Dunedin Consort singers gave a memorable performance of Tarik O’Regan’s Scattered Rhymes, it was a joy to hear another of his choral pieces, The Ecstasies Above. Setting Edgar Allan Poe’s Israfel, which recognises the beauty of the archangel but also his otherworldliness, the piece is full of rhythmic challenges as well as shifts in dynamics. With instrumental support from a quartet of SCO players – violinists Gordon Bragg and Amira Bedrush-McDonald, violist Brian Schiele and cellist Philip Higham – those sopranos were once again on star form.
They did not have the whole show to themselves, however, and the full-voiced basses sounded remarkably Russian for John Tavener’s Syvati, the choir’s drones and Eastern intervals complemented by Higham’s cello from the minstrel’s gallery, from where he also played Tavener’s contemporaneous cello solo, Chant.
The other liturgical works in the programme were Roxanna Panufnik’s Kyrie after Byrd, inspired by the 16th century composer and less than a decade old, and the opener from James MacMillan’s Strathclyde Motets, from 2007 and ideally voiced to introduce the sound of the choir in this historic venue.
If there was an enticement for the uninitiated to buy tickets, it was in Ralph Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending, regularly voted the public’s favourite classical piece. Few, however, would have heard it in this arrangement by Paul Drayton, in which Bragg’s violin had a choral accompaniment and the instrumental soloist only had our full attention in the closing bars.
Using a brutally condensed version of the George Meredith poem that inspired the composer (fewer that a tenth of the lines of verse), the score is mostly wordless and demands a broad range of techniques from both the full choir and a number of individual voices within it. Like much else in the recital, it proved a demonstration of the technical mastery of the SCO Chorus.
Keith Bruce
