Christmas concerts are money for jam, aren’t they? Book a venue, dig out 100 Carols for Choirs, bung in a reading or two, get the audience to sing Hark the Herald, job done. Everybody goes home happy, especially the choir treasurer.
Yes, there are Christmas concerts like that. The New Cambridge Singers concert was, on the whole, not one of them, blending old favourites with less familiar material and grouping the carols by theme, starting with four on the Virgin Mary and moving on to the Shepherds, then the Christ Child and finally Celebration. I suppose one could quibble with the title, because it was really Christmas Around Europe (though America did get a look-in with “Jingle Bells” at the end), but it was nonetheless a programme full of variety and interest.
The Downing Place URC has recently had a makeover, and now offers a bright and welcoming space for concerts and other events. The hard parquet floors, high wooden roof and bare walls however mean it has a very noisy acoustic, and certain types of music work better than others. There was not much hope for Bach’s “Ehre sei Gott” with its busy counterpoint, for instance, especially accompanied by an electronic organ distinctly lacking in bite and presence, and the same has to be said for Matthias’s “A Babe is Born”, however alert and agile choir and organist were.
On the whole it was the slower-moving pieces that worked best. Berlioz’s “Shepherds’ Farewell” was a high-point of the first half with a hushed and tender performance from the choir. The singers’ sure intonation was triumphantly demonstrated in the Willcocks arrangement of “Quelle est cette odeur”, which riskily leaves the choir unaccompanied for two verses before bringing the organ back for the coda. Pavel Chesnokov’s “O Tebe Raduyetsia” was written for just such an acoustic as this and demonstrated the choir’s sustained and well-blended tone, though I think you really need to be Russian to be able to perform this music with conviction.
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Chesnokov (1877-1944) was a new name to me, but I suspect that Simon Beattie’s setting of “Angel and Unicorn”, his own translation of a poem on the annunciation by Rainer Maria Rilke, was new to everyone. This was its second performance (you can see the first one on YouTube at https://youtu.be/hFed7Jaw7g4) and the choir conjured up a mood of hushed mystery lit up by occasional piercing dissonances. It was a very Cambridge touch that the performance was preceded by a reading of the poem in the original German, but I can’t have been the only audience member who wished that the English words had been printed in the programme.
The programme was completed by old favourites such as the Willcocks arrangements of “The Infant King” and “Infant Holy”, and the Rutter version of “Quem pastores”, all warmly and sensitively performed, though I wondered if Pearsall’s “In Dulci Jubilo” could have done with another run-through. Things were rounded off nicely with Mack Wilberg’s witty arrangement of “Ding Dong Merrily”, dextrously accompanied by Alex Robson, and a close-harmony style “Jingle Bells” by conductor Graham Walker. Oh, and “Hark the Herald” of course, so I lost at #Harkageddon (look it up) in the second week of Advent.
William Hale