Empire Theatre, Eden Court, 25 April 2009

Rowena Calvert

TO MANY it may seem like a brave choice to programme two modern works by British composers and present them to an Inverness audience. But the friends and supporters of Inverness Choral Society are nothing if not loyal, and while there were one or two empty seats in the nether regions of the Empire Theatre, everyone who came last Saturday evening was rewarded with two enthralling and contrasting choral compositions.

The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace by Karl Jenkins may have had pride of place in the programme over John Rutter’s Requiem, but in truth it is not that hard to decide which work is the more convincing and musically satisfying.

One may be spectacular with a universal message while the other is more melodic and thought-provoking. The one draws on the tenets of several religions while the other includes additional Christian texts to the regular liturgy of the Requiem Mass. And in both the forces of the chorus are on their feet and the soloists on their seats far more than is usual.

Rehearsal time for Inverness Choral is limited and it speaks volumes for the inherent standard they have achieved in recent years under conductor Gordon Tocher that so much could be delivered so well in one performance.

The Rutter Requiem achieved popularity right from its first performance in October 1985, an inevitable result considering the delightful melodies that haunt the work from start to finish. The seven sections form a palindromic meditation on the themes of life and death. The central Sanctus showed the chorus in fine form with an affirmation of divine glory.

On each side are the two more personal prayers of the Pie Jesu and the Agnus Dei. In the first of these we heard the guest soprano, Jessica Leary, for the first time. She is yet one more of the emergent constellation of singers who are benefiting from the attentions of Inverness Choral’s Honorary Patron, Patricia MacMahon.

Rutter scored this part without vibrato, allowing the female soprano voice to sound very like a boy treble, and Jessica achieved this effect to perfection. The balancing Agnus Dei is sung by the chorus alone, opening with the male voices with a pianissimo obligato from the timpani, and building into a crescendo before reducing into a short passage for the solo flute of Catherine O’Rourke, and ending with the full chorus reciting the prayer for the dead.

Moving out in the palindrome to the sections that are not part of the standard Requiem liturgy, the orchestral soloists were featured in the second section, Out Of The Deep, based on Psalm 130, and in the sixth section where the words are those of Psalm 23, The Lord Is My Shepherd.

For Out Of The Deep the cello obligato was played by the guest principal cellist, Rowena Calvert, a Sutherland girl who went to study at the Yehudi Menuhin School, followed by the Royal Academy of Music and her postgraduate degree at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, widely recognised as having one of the finest cello departments anywhere.

Last year, I witnessed her progress with the mentoring of Alistair Tait during the Mendelssohn on Mull Festival, and predicted in Northings that Rowena “was destined to become a musical star of the future”. After hearing her again on Saturday, all I can do is reiterate my prediction.

Her delicate and expressive playing inspired the chorus to a first class rendition of this psalm. Fiona Gordon took the oboe part for the 23rd Psalm and provided a perfect counterpart for the controlled and emotive singing of the chorus with a melody that would have been comfortable as one of Canteloupe’s Songs of the Auvergne.

The opening and closing sections, Requiem Aeternam and Lux Aeterna, share the same beautiful and memorable melody that evolves out of a sombre introduction. The two parts differed in the addition of the pure soprano voice of Jessica Leary to the closing section. The appeal of that tune was emphasised by the number of the audience who were humming it as they went out for their interval refreshments.

If all the publicity for this concert by Inverness Choral Society is anything to go by, I must be one of the few people who had not heard the Karl Jenkins work, The Armed Man: A Mass For Peace. But I had listened to his earlier work, Adiemus – Dances of Time, often enough, and was captivated by the range of melodies it contains.

The Armed Man was commissioned by the Royal Armouries to commemorate the millennium in 2000, and was greeted enthusiastically from the first performance onwards. So it was with eager anticipation that I listened to the opening bars.

In years past the sound of the orchestra that accompanied Inverness Choral was best left to the memory, but now the Inverness Choral Sinfonia has evolved in parallel to the choir itself into a most respectable ensemble. Never before has it been the size that was needed for The Armed Man, well over fifty musicians, and it shows the respect it has earned that it was able to recruit the extra forces from players who are better known as members of the national orchestras.

The Armed Man is a spectacular work, loaded with military allusions, that draws upon several of the religions that make the world a less than safe place. While most of the sections are drawn from Christian traditions over the centuries, there are also references to Islamic, Buddhist and Shinto beliefs.

Indeed its message is about the horrors and futility of war, albeit in a theatrical manner. There were drums and trumpets galore; there was powerful singing from all the voices in the chorus; there were the velvet tones of guest mezzo soloist, Lilly Papaioannou.

Rutter’s Requiem and Jenkins’ The Armed Man are a pair of contrasting but complementary compositions, a sort of choral equivalent of Cav and Pag, that together make a satisfying event. On its own the Requiem is not as meaty as it could be; and in The Armed Man the Jenkins melodies were overpowered by the spectacle.

From a performance standpoint I cannot fault the concert; Gordon Tocher and his forces delivered exactly what was on the page; the chorus sang well up to the standard we have come to expect, and they had a huge amount to sing; the Sinfonia has developed into an orchestra that is good enough to have a life of its own; the guest soloists graced the stage to perfection.

Musically I have a subjective reservation in that I felt that The Armed Man, as a composition, did not live up to its hype. But it is the members of the audience who are the final judges, and they were enthusiastic and appreciative with their applause. The last comment came from the Sinfonia’s leader, Robin Calvert, as he left the stage. He stopped for a brief moment and squeezed his daughter Rowena’s shoulder to say how well she had done.

May I end with a plea to the Inverness Choral Society’s Programme Editor. I accept that £2 seems to be the going rate for a theatre programme these days, although it does seem rather a lot for three sheets of A4 and a cover. But please remember that your supporters in the audience are trying to follow the performance in subdued lighting, and that many of them are of an age when eyesight is not as strong as it once was.

I am so looking forward to the Brahms German Requiem and the Bruckner Motets in November, but please, please can we have a programme with a much larger text font, even if it means a few more sheets of paper.

© James Munro, 2009

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