Peace on earth in troubled times could have been a heading for this text-laden programme of mostly a cappella 20th century choral music. One expects a few challenging works from the BBC Singers, but even by their standards this was an ambitious potpourri with much to digest for those of us following screeds of surtitles. Yet this was also a chance to hear the country’s oldest professional vocal ensemble in repertoire that one seldom hears in live performance, least of all when these rarities are thrown together in a single evening. And when you’ve got a chamber ensemble of some 26 singers, expanded from 18 for this occasion, you can afford to push the boat out in terms of virtuosic music for double choir.
First up was Thea Musgrave’s Rorate coeli, a tour de force from 1973 that interweaves two poems of William Dunbar (written circa 1500); one concerning Christ’s Nativity, the other focusing on his death and Resurrection. Its dense textures (double choir with divisions and solo passages) include cluster chords and spoken words, and, at one point, a requirement for sopranos to imitate the sound of celestial fowls. Praise be for any choir that can navigate its way round this score’s complexities. Yet Principal Guest Conductor Owain Park brought out all the work’s joy and disquiet as well as ensuring total security when the composer requires a vocalist to “sing any pitch within the range indicated”. Whatever the merits of the score’s polytextural techniques and its polished rendition, it’s a work might be better appreciated within a lecture recital.
The BBC Singers made a compelling case for Benjamin Britten’s A.M.D.G (‘Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam’ / ‘to the greater glory of God’), settings of Gerard Manley Hopkins from 1939 that, mysteriously, were never performed in full in Britten’s lifetime. Consequently, they have yet to establish themselves alongside works such as his Hymn to St Cecilia. However, there’s plenty to enjoy within its seven movements, each occupying a different mood. The Singers caught the repeated note patterns of ‘Rosa Mystica’ to perfection and brought a breathless ecstasy to ‘O Deus ego amo te’. ‘Heaven-Haven’ had a fresh-air simplicity, while ‘God’s Grandeur’ showed the choir at its most incisive, delivering its own electrical charge to match Hopkins’s text. Both Prayers were heartwarming and there was a determined energy in the marching rhythms of ‘The Soldier’.
Either side of the interval came Palestrina’s Rorate coeli and Daniel Kidane’s highly effective The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash, the latter a memorial to the Covid era. Simon Armitage’s atmospheric text, focusing on a patient’s view from a hospital window, is set to chant-like phrases supported by ‘birdsong’ commentary from Richard Pearce on the piano.
A century earlier, came Schoenberg’s notoriously difficult Friede auf Erden, a work so demanding in 1907 that its first singers gave up on its torturous harmonic language.This performance made light of its dense textures, with Park coaxing a perfectly balanced and flowing account with poised, tender singing showing no sense of strain for its savage outbursts. The result was utterly transporting, and its closing bars as ecstatic as I can remember from any other performance.
If the Schoenberg wasn’t taxing enough, it was followed by Poulenc’s war time cantata Figure humaine, a coup de maître of choral writing conceived during the darkest days of occupied France and premiered by the BBC Singers in 1945. Unlike anything else in the composer’s output, the work is a supreme test that requires pinpoint intonation, stamina and vocal range. Its text by Paul Éluard is a hymn to freedom, crowned by the word ‘Liberté ’with a spectacular high E sung here by one fearless soprano. Tuning from the singers was mostly first class, but it was the work’s intensity of expression that came across vividly in a performance of stunning conviction.
David Truslove
Musgrave – Rorate coeli; Britten – A.M.D.G; Palestrina – Rorate coeli; Kidane – The Song Thrush and the Mountain Ash; Schoenberg – Friede auf Erden; Poulenc – Figure humaine
BBC Singers, Richard Pearce – piano; Owain Park – conductor
Snape Maltings Concert Hall, Suffolk; 26 June 2025
Top image: BBC Singers
All photos © Britten Pears Arts