The Bath Festival Concert 20 May 17
Daniel-Lesur, Duruflé, Martin
Last year marked Bath Camerata’s return to the Bath International Music Festival with a performance of Sergei Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil by candlelight at St. Mary’s, Bathwick. After the success of that concert, the choir were delighted to be invited back to perform again this year, this time with a somewhat different programme of music. In recent months Camerata have been experimenting with styles of music rarely visited before, including the expressionist stylings of Schoenberg and ranging through to pieces by Glass, Stravinsky, Riley, Lang and more. Sofor the festival we geared up for some of the toughest pieces of music that we, as a choir, had encountered in recent years.
We began the concert with John-Yves Daniel-Lesur’s Le Cantique des Cantiques (‘The Song of Songs’), a unique and intricate work written in the mid-90’s for 12 acappella voices. The text itself is a combination of the final chapter of the Writings of the Hebrew Bible, some of which translated into French, and verses from the New Testament and various other Latin texts. The main subject of the piece, taken from The Song of Songs, is the celebration of love and sexual desire between two people, which Daniel-Lesur then helped translate into a mass of gorgeous, colourful music. It consists of seven movements, all of which presented their own musical challenges. The opening ‘Dialogue’ introduces a beautiful soaring melody over a soft chorus of alleluias, culminating in an eruption of rich harmony over the acclaim of ‘l’amour.’ In contrast, the third movement, ‘Le Songe,’ is a complex, aggressive movement, where the alto’s deep and jagged melody depict a woman’s desperate search for her loved one, whilst the basses are quietly praising God to a complex, rhythmic pattern underneath. The whole piece comes to a head in the ‘Épithalame,’ resulting in a high and harmonious exclamation as the two lovers are finally together in their marital chamber. This majestic piece was unlike anything we had sung before, but the choir relished the challenge and particularly enjoyed the fresh approach to this not-so well known work.
To break up to the larger pieces of music, we went back to something more well-known among audiences these days. Maurice Duruflé’s Quatre motets sur des thèmes grégoriens is a beloved work by both our choir and choirs around the world, most famous for its first movement, the ‘Ubi Caritas.’ Duruflé wrote the four motets around their original plainchants, which helps to give it its wonderful simplicity, and in a concert of this magnitude it was a welcome break!
The final work of this eclectic evening was Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Mass for unaccompanied double choir. This piece is a tapestry of melodic and rhythmic intricacy, every note being written for a very specific purpose. It consists of five movements, although the last movement stands out as it was an addition to the piece many years after Martin completed the first four. Each movement has its own musical colour and are creative and innovative in their own right, not just as an entire work. In my opinion, the final movement, the ‘Agnus Dei,’ was the most powerful of the lot. After the fugal nature of the ‘Gloria,’ complete with a nod to Vivaldi’s work of the same name, and the rhythmic madness of the ‘Sanctus,’ this ending is a reflective, well-earned conclusion. With a slow, complex harmonic accompaniment to a simple yet gorgeous plainchant-styled melody, this was the perfect finish to this amazing work and to this amazing concert.
I think I can speak for every member of the choir when I say this was not an easy road. It took hard work and a hell of a lot of perseverance. But the end result was something that I have never seen from this choir before, and I am immensely proud of what we achieved. It proves the musical diversity of the group, and it opens the doors to even more challenging repertoire in the future
Sam Young, baritone
