Roger O. Doyle is professor of music at the University of Portland and is a conductor of many choirs in the north-western region of the US. The programme he chose for his concert in the National Chamber Choir's "Sacred and Profane" series at the National Gallery on Thursday was an all-American one, broadening the choir's repertoire to include works by Elliott Carter, Daniel Pinkham and Randall Thompson as well as some excerpts from Aaron Copland's second opera, The Tender Land.
Choral singing is alive and well in the US, and Doyle brought to the NCC a welcome breeze of New World freshness. His sense of responsive enjoyment spilled over into the peculiarly American warmth with which he introduced the items on the programme.
The style of his music-making brought singing from the choir that dispensed with their customary air of stress. The sense of relaxation was one that brought with it a tighter focus in intonation, a firmer feeling of vocal line, a greater security in extremes of register, and, most welcome of all, a surer response to distinctions in musical style.
Whether it was in the rounded resonances of Thompson's Alleluia, the finely-worked complexities of Carter's early Musicians Wrestle Everywhere, or the very different popular approaches of Pinkham's Wedding Cantata and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, Doyle impressed in the way he got his singers to accommodate, and adjust to, the demands of the music.
The overtly popular element in the programme was let down by a fussy arrangement of Stephen Foster's Camptown Races and a surely redundant piano duet arrangement (played by Fergal Caulfield and David Brophy) of Edward MacDowell's Woodland Sketches, originally for piano solo. However, nothing in the evening detracted seriously from the pleasure that was to be had from hearing the choir working closer to its potential than is its wont, and, in a fresh field of repertoire, shedding the typically heavy and stylistically insensitive manner that limits so much of its work.
Nick Cave, who performed yesterday at the Liss Ard Festival in Co Cork.
