Culloden Academy, 18 November 2006

Karl Jenkins

LOOKING Through the Inverness Choral Society’s list of past programmes, it is something of a departure for them to be singing music from as long ago as the sixteenth century, but this is how they opened their latest concert.

In an intelligent bit of programming, they performed the Kyrie from the four-part Mass ‘L’Homme armé’ by the Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, a master whose elegant choral polyphony is often cited as the perfect model of its kind.

At the core of this Mass is the 15th-century Burgundian recruiting song ‘L’homme armé’, and it is this same music which was used more than four centuries later by the composer Karl Jenkins in ‘The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace’, the main work in the programme.

Under the steady baton of Gordon Tocher, the singers provided a performance of the Palestrina which featured some pleasing light and shade, qualities which they also applied to motets by the German composer Orlandus Lassus and the Spaniard Tomás Luis de Victoria.

For the next work, the delicious ‘Laudate Dominum’ from Mozart’s ‘Solemn Vespers’, the choir were joined by their guest soloist for the evening, the delightful Greek-born Lilly Papaioannou, whose rich mezzo-soprano voice and natural musicality provided a memorable reading of Mozart’s moving music.

For a solo slot, a traditional feature of many Choral Society concerts, she offered ‘Che faro senza Euredice’ from Gluck’s opera Orfeo, an aria intended for the male alto voice of the hero Orfeo, but given a powerfully charged performance by Miss Papaioannou.

In an early Christmas treat, she also presented Michael Head’s lovely setting of ‘The little road to Bethlehem’ (perhaps the organisers missed a trick here by not using one of the several manifestations of this work which also involve choir), continuing with a charming tribute to Kathleen Ferrier in an unaccompanied rendition of ‘Blow the wind southerly’, before concluding with a saucy performance of the Seguidilla from Bizet’s ‘Carmen’.

Throughout this impressive display of versatility, she was sensitively accompanied by Sheila Bruce on the piano, who then joined a small instrumental ensemble for the major work in the programme, Karl Jenkins ‘The Armed Man’.

Catapulted to fame by the runaway success of a series of choral works drawing on world music under the broad heading ‘Adiemus’, Jenkins was commissioned to write a choral work for the millennium, and decided to take the opportunity to look back five centuries to the L’homme armé’ tradition.

From the treasury of some fifty Masses in which the tune was used to celebrate military prowess, Jenkins chose the Palestrina setting as a peg, but also decided to subvert the original context of the melody to condemn war and celebrate peace.

‘The Armed Man’ opens with a setting of the original tune, given a spirited performance by the singers, before a pre-recorded Muslim call to prayer and a setting of the Mass ‘Kyrie’, which alludes to the Palestrina ‘Kyrie’.

It is clear even from this opening sequence that the work will be nothing if not international and eclectic, and in the ensuing movements Jenkins intersperses elements of the ordinary of the Mass with sources as diverse as Kipling, Dryden, Swift, The Mahabarata, Mallory, Toge Sankichi (a Hiroshima witness), and Guy Wilson.

If not all of the verse bears comparison with the finest, and Jenkins’ tuneful settings are somewhat prone to cliché, there is no doubting the sincerity of the piece, and the choir’s committed and passionate performance was well supported by the instrumental ensemble.

Percussionists Geoff Blogg and David Kirk were often prominent in the texture, and they acquitted themselves particularly impressively. In the course of the work the singers are asked to tackle interweaving polyphonic lines, punchy compound rhythms, passages of hushed intensity and episodes of aleatoric wailing, and it is a testimony to the versatility of the choir and their conductor that they accomplished this all admirably.

This was an evening that celebrated diversity and internationality, and with music from four centuries and many different lands it is only appropriate that we join the singers in the concluding sentiment, ‘Better peace than war’.

© D James Ross, 2006