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MAY FESTIVAL 2007 ST. GERMANS PARISH CHURCH
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| 6.00 pm Sunday 13th May Festival Choral Evensong | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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In early May, the East Cornwall Bach Choir once again thrilled their audiences at
the St Germans festival, a 3-night antidote to the Eurovision song contest.
Friday’s night’s concert had a theme of ‘In memoriam’. After the opening Brahms sextet in Bb major, the remaining three pieces were written by Bach in memorial to a senior post mistress, by Avo Pärt to mourn Benjamin Britten, and finally by Richard Strauss as an epitaph to the 2nd World War destruction of his beloved Germany. Although the mood was sombre, the musicality was magnificent. Choir master Paul Ellis demonstrated his choral ambitiousness by choosing to present the Bach motet entirely unaccompanied. Such an exposed approach would have taxed any leading choir, but was skilfully sung apart from a quickly-recovered dissonance at the beginning of the Gute Nacht chorale. The 23-piece string ensemble led by Mary Eade expertly rendered the evening’s range of styles, and was joined in the Pärt cantus by the haunting note of a single tubular bell, an addition to the original score featured in the film Fahrenheit 9/11. After the sombre mood of the Friday concert, the Saturday concert opened to a capacity audience with the Haydn Te Deum in C, an ebullient piece accompanied by a full orchestra which only briefly moved from a joyous C major to a thoughtful C minor. There followed the Bruckner Mass in E minor, a work of staggering genius which in several passages anticipates the best of 20th century classical music. The choir’s opening Kyrie was breathtakingly haunting, rising to wonderful crescendos. The concert finished with more Haydn, once again in the joyous style that Haydn felt obliged to apologise for to 18th century clerics. Here, the choir was helped by a skilled and entertaining line-up of soloists from England, Wales and Sweden, who clearly relished and enjoyed their relatively straight-forward but beautifully sung arias. The weekend was rounded off by a robust Stanford-centred choral evensong, conducted and accompanied by organist Mike Hodge. Overall, the weekend moved from desolation to joy, from the loneliness of unaccompanied arpeggios to the joyful union of choir, orchestra and soloists singing praises to God. At times on the Saturday, the music was so uplifting that one felt transported out of oneself – and the great Norman pillars of St Germans Abbey, which themselves have moved from near collapse to venerated old age, seemed to join in the rapture. Truly an experience which those who stayed at home to watch Eurovision might have wished for. Peter Matthews, May 2007 | ||||||||||||||||||||||