Above : Conductor of the Choir of King’s College Cambridge for this Musica Viva tour, Daniel Hyde. Daniel will become the choir’s next Director of Music later this year.
Choir of King’s College Cambridge continues its long association with Musica Viva with its recent tour of Australia. The concert at City Recital Hall this week was a compelling mixture of fare from five centuries of choral tradition through to 2018. This diverse programme also saw the choir members perform in collaboration with Australian instrumentalists.
The Kings School trebles of the choir were joined in this concert by Australian harpist Alice Giles. Via this collaboration we were treated to a fine version of Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols just prior to interval. In its intended format for trebles and harp, the young voices and virtuoso harpist dazzled us with the purity of tone and austere stillness that this work is loved for.
The blend between voices and harp was exceptional, giving a full-bodied result.and It was enjoyable to hear the variety of unique treble voices penetrating the stillness in solo moments. The part
singing in ‘This Little Babe’ was delivered with solid rapid fire precision. Raw beauty of disciplined vocal tone was also matched with flexibility of phrasing and expressive freedoms to emphasize word painting. This was heard in the tracing of the opening ‘Hodie Christus natus est’ and beyond.
This concert also took a break from its eleven choral items to let the exciting harp playing of Alice Giles once more be heard. We witnessed innovative and complex writing for the harp by early
twentieth century harpist-composer Carlos Salzedo in his Variations sur un thème dans le style ancien. Giles drew on her seemingly endless resources of colour, shape and nuance to present the successive sections of this demanding score to us.
Throughout the concert we heard the adults and children of the full choir present some beautiful demanding textures from Gibbons, Byrd, Tallis, Monteverdi, Bach and Cavalli under the clear
guidance of director Daniel Hyde. This more traditional music was offered up with the choir’s exquisite blend and controlled choral lightness regardless of busy part singing or polyphony.
In the concert’s second half we were able to witness the choral scholars and school aged choristers come back to the future from such traditions and successfully present choral gems of the
contemporary style with equally controlled delivery and a perfect blend for the creating of modern atmospheres.
The previously heard sensitive cello playing in the form of Baroque continuo from Umberto Clerici was transformed into fine string counterpoint and accompaniment when the choir introduced us to
the twenty-first century carol setting of ‘O Mercy Divine’ by Master of the Queen’s Music, Judith Weir.
As well as the shimmering line of sound created by the choir in British composer Errollyn Wallen’s organically growing a cappella utterance Pace (2017), the choir performed Australian composer
Ross Edwards’ commissioned work Singing the Love (2018) with incredible buoyancy and intelligent openness when realising the innovative text setting and evolved choral techniques in Edward’s.
version of the Bible’s Psalm 100.
Musica Viva once more in this way ensured that its International Concert Season guests turned their talents towards local music, and commissioned works in world premiere to further gild an already stellar programme.
This diverse concert concluded with a full-voiced performance of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ colourful and commanding anthem Valiant-For-Truth (1940). The singers offered up some of the event’s loudest but still clean and balanced choral climaxes throughout this work. This choir left all assembled grateful for the
experience of hearing this legendary musical force live in this country again.