On the evening of 17 July 2024 Nelson Cathedral was fortunate to be one of the venues chosen by the Chapel Choir of Christ’s College Cambridge for its July 2024 Tour of New Zealand. The much anticipated concert delighted the capacity audience at the Cathedral from the moment the choir began with Sancte Deus from the early period of Thomas Tallis (1505-85) and associated with Henry VIII’s reign.
This highly dramatic and emotional motet has unusual scoring that requires the voice parts to fit many notes to each syllable and has the bass part sounding above the tenor part from time to time. The choir moved effortlessly through passages of challenging dissonance to the lovely extended final Amen. Achieving and maintaining perfect pitch from one organ note was to be a feature of this concert.
Their next piece, Clap your hands together, was an anthem by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). This anthem involved a dense and demanding middle section where the choir sang to one another, making superb use of an eight-voice double choir layout. It was first performed in 1622 at a ceremony in Oxford where Gibbons received the degree of Doctor of Music. The first half ended with selected songs from Parry’s Songs of Farewell (Hubert Parry, 1848-1918), and his Blest Pair of Sirens. Parry's Songs of Farewell represent the composer’s personal response to losing many friends in World War 1, and, as their collective title implies, the six motets are essentially valedictory.
The Chapel Choir of Christ’s College Cambridge gave an excellent rendition of Songs Four and Five, where the contrapuntal music has two or more separate melodies that are sung at the same time, with each successive song increasing the number of voices singing and therefore increasing the complexity of the song. Blest Pair of Sirens, with an organ accompaniment from Clare Pryor, completed a flawless first half, conducted by Davon Halim. This piece, commissioned to celebrate Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887, has text taken from John Milton’s ode At a solemn Musick, in which the poet describes the rapture experienced on listening to sacred music. Blest Pair of Sirens allowed the organist to use the whole instrument for mood and tempo shifts for an effective accompaniment to the eight-part choral writing.
The second part of the concert was mainly devoted to the Missa Brevis by Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967). The Missa Brevis was written originally as a solo organ piece and later rearranged as a Missa Brevis for organ and mixed choir. It was first performed in Budapest in 1945 in a cloakroom at the destroyed Opera House. In addition to the usual six movements, the Missa Brevis includes an opening Introitus and a closing ‘Ite, missa est’, both for solo organ.
The regular parts of the Mass – Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, Benedictus and Agnus Dei – are framed by the addition of these two short movements for solo 2 organ. The work’s distinctive character comes mainly from Kodály's modal harmony and melodies inspired by folksongs. The choir sang with impeccable balance and feeling.
The trio of high soprano soloists who sang during the Kyrie, Eleanor Worth, Em Sparkes and Rebecca Lee, created the most wonderful cascade of sound. Equally wonderful were the soloists for the Gloria, Jemma Jeffery, Noam Perl Treves and Manav Paul, supported by the choir singing a joyous Gloria. Of particular note was the rendition of the passionate, sometimes dark, Agnus Dei, featuring sections of low bass notes, five of the soloists, and the trio of high soprano soloists, reworking passages from the Kyrie to bring the Mass full circle. The work concluded with the Ite, Missa Est organ solo, the first time the organist, Clare Pryor, had performed this on the choir’s July 2024 New Zealand tour. Clare played a superb Ite, Missa Est, which was a triumphant affirmation based on themes from the Missa Brevis.
The programme concluded with three short pieces, conducted by Manav Paul (2003-): Oculi omnium, a modern, complex grace for College by Manav Paul; Keep me as the apple of the eye, by Annabel Rooney (1973-), an alumni of Christ’s College, a cellist, and now a sought after composer, and featuring a solo by Viesturs Spūlis; and The Lamb by John Tavener (1944-2013), a classic piece popular with English choirs. The choir sang all three pieces to show contrast in the compositions and maintained the perfect pitch that had characterised the concert.
The audience was treated to an encore, The Blue Bird, by C.V. Stanford (1852-1924). The music is set to a poem by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, reflecting a fleeting moment of natural beauty:
The lake lay blue below the hill.
O'er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.
The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.
As the diminishing notes of The Blue Bird faded into silence, the choir created the perfect ending to a perfect evening. This multi-talented and thoroughly professional young choir brought us an uplifting and memorable concert from the other side of the world.
They are welcome back any time!
Sally Hallmark July 2024
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