Miserere
Miserere – Adelaide Chamber Singers, St Peter’s Cathedral, North Adelaide, March 8
The Adelaide Chamber Singers are a marvelous ensemble and it would be a very special event for next year’s Sydney Festival (Fergus - how about it please?) to have them bring this program and another to, say, Angel Place.
For the 2008 Adelaide Festival, the group filled St Peter’s with heavenly voices and a sell-out audience at a still furnace-like 10.30pm during Adelaide’s incredibly sustained heat wave.
It is a tribute to the Singers that no one fainted, no one left and all remained awake and enthralled despite the extreme heat and close proximity of 1000+ bodies. (No fans, no air-con and all doors and windows closed to ensure ABC Classic FM’s live broadcast sound quality!)
The evening began with the oldest work: Lamentations for Maundy Thursday by Tomas Luis de Victoria (1585). It was a solemn and stately piece in which solo and ensemble voices soared in turn in precise and beautifully controlled passages.
They followed it with a brief contemporary work by Scottish composer James Macmillan, Christus Vincit which again demonstrated how very fine is the group and how well they work under the direction of leader Carl Crossin.
By the time the Singers took their places (augmented by a band of wind, brass, strings, percussion, organ, electric guitar and bass) for the Australian premiere of Arvo Part’s Miserere the atmosphere was – pardon me – hot.
Part’s 35 minute, 20 verse composition is a work of almost unbearable tension and control. For the singers, each word is – quite literally – a separate challenge as they, soloists and choir, move through the piece, note by note. It’s evidence of why the Baltic maestro is such a star of contemporary classical music: minimal, beautiful, complex and inspiring and – on this occasion – able to rise above conditions that would have felled a lesser work and lesser musicians.
Will someone please bring them to Sydney?
