Dublin Castle
Monteverdi – Madrigals from Il pastor fido. Kevin Volans – Canciones del Alma. Lobo – Pater peccavi. Correia – Hostias et preces. Cristo – Inter vestibulum et altare. Monteverdi – Magnificat.
The National Chamber Choir has been through a tough time. Its hugely successful artistic director, Celso Antunes, chief executive, Karina Lundström, and board member David Byers resigned in highly controversial circumstances in 2006. Its very existence was threatened by the winding down and eventual withdrawal of its long-standing funding from RTÉ.
In 2006 the choir made 38 appearances that I am aware of, and Antunes conducted 25 of these. Last year, his successor, Paul Hillier was on the rostrum for nine of just 11 appearances. There have been contractual changes for the singers, too. The strain is beginning to show in ways unthinkable in the Antunes years.
For Thursday's sold-out concert in the Royal Chapel in Dublin Castle Hillier opted to open with a sequence of madrigals. Monteverdi set on texts he selected from Giovanni Battista Guarini's 1590 play, Il pastor fido. Hillier verbally introduced the madrigals, filling in the background of the misfiring relationships between the Arcadian characters of the play.
It was a nice idea, but one that was undermined by Hillier’s decision not to use the full complement of the choir, but limit himself to groups of five or 10 singers. There were problems of choral blend and accuracy of intonation that were simply shocking. And, whatever the cause, the singers seemed to be straining, sometimes with rather too much vibrato, for effects that simply didn’t come off.
Sadly, things didn't get much better in the première of Kevin Volans's Canciones del Alma, a work commissioned by Elizabeth Chatwin in memory of her husband, writer Bruce Chatwin, who died in 1989. Volans's treatment of words by St John of the Cross, full of fire, consuming heat, and intensely penetrating light, calls for a piano (John Godfrey), which often moved in spread-eagled arpeggios, and sometimes made angry-sounding interjections over the voices.
The voices themselves moved and meshed in blocks that always seemed heavily weighted, even when the sound thinned out in the highest register. Although there were passages where conductor and singers gave the impression of having the work in focus, there were simply too many key moments where the singing lacked confidence and security.
Order was restored in the three works by Portuguese composers of the Renaissance, with the plaintive tone and poignant dissonances of Fernão Correia's Hostiaset preces making the best impression. And terra firma was reached in the closing Monteverdi Magnificat, where the style of delivery was, if anything, almost too assertive.
