SWEET AND LOW
Australian Boys Choral Institute
Wesley Church, Lonsdale St., Melbourne
Sunday March 17, 2024
Nicholas Dinopoulos
Oh to be in Melbourne, now that Easter’s near. One delight of living in the Victorian capital is being bathed in choices where choral music is concerned at this time of year. My sense of nostalgia was heightened when the Institute’s director Nicholas Dinopoulos mentioned, in a throwaway line that the Australian Boys Choir would be taking part in a reading of the St. Matthew Passion next Sunday at Monash University (modestly not indicating that he himself would be singing the Christus role). Will we hear the St. Matthew or the St John Passion on the Gold Coast in the next few weeks? Or anything in Brisbane along the Bachian line? I don’t think so.
It came as an unexpected surprise to realize that, in over four decades of reviewing in Melbourne, I’d been inside Lonsdale Street’s Wesley Church only once and the experience had left absolutely no memory. As a venue for this choral recital, the space proved very comfortable for the singers in transmitting dynamic changes successfully and having just enough resonance not to be intrusive. But it was mainly due to the organizational skills of the ABCI’s backing staff that the program moved forward as steadily as it did, what with the organization’s various bodies and sub-groups entering and exiting with near-seamless facility.
I watched this event thanks to the good graces of that invaluable resource, the Australian Digital Concert Hall, but missed the opening number, Australian writer Dan Walker‘s The Wanderer, thanks to a connection glitch in my machinery. Nonetheless, as ADCH patrons know, you have online access to any event you’ve paid for up to seven days after the initial transmission. Both this opening number and the conclusion – Bob Chilcott‘s The Invention of Printing and The Abolition of Slavery from the cycle Five Days that Changed the World – called upon all the young men and boys enrolled in the Institute’s various bodies. For all that, a major part of this afternoon’s program was taken on by the organization’s senior members, the Vocal Consort.
This is an expert ensemble with a full-bodied sound and an admirable security of pitch; just as well as much of their work was unaccompanied and it was a true test of these 17 singers that you could rarely point to an enunciative flaw. They began with Robert Shaw and Alice Parker’s arrangement for TTBB of the English sea shanty Swansea Town and straightaway produced an attractive combined timbre of high definition with an even dynamic attack. The top tenor descant sounded rather reticent from bar 29 to bar 32 but you had to appreciate the rhythmical drive and the crisp observation of the dotted-quaver-semiquaver patterns in the opening and closing phrases of each stanza.
Barnby’s setting of Tennyson’s touching lullaby gave this recital its title and here the Consort showed its ability in a much less punchy piece with the original SATB setting preserved comfortably and some passages of particularly elegant phrasing, especially the second stanza’s pianissimo opening at bar 19. About now, you became aware of the group’s possession of an excellent top tenor line – ringing and plangent in turn.
You could find the same restrained eloquence in the group’s reading of Kurt Bestor‘s Prayer of the Children, one of the richest I’ve come across in terms of choral timbre. I don’t know who did the arrangement but it proved highly suitable for this choir’s personnel; the versions I’ve come across online have a certain amount of metrical fluency but here you came across some moments of mensural originality, climaxing in a long pause before the final powerful ‘help me’ appeal at bar 40 (in my edition); not to mention the brief Croatian murmured ejaculation starting at bar 45 blending into the sombre resignation of the piece’s last moments – a splendidly accomplished sequence.
This group finished their first half offerings with a deft arrangement, again by Robert Shaw and Alice Parker of Vive l’amour/la compagnie which the program refers to as American traditional. Apparently it’s not a product of the republic but of England. Still, in the best USA puritan tradition, the words in this version were a tad bowdlerized and, from what I can make out, the American university glee clubs have taken it over. I can’t find a performance online that’s as clean-cut or deftly outlined as this one from the Consort (with a one-line interpolated solo from Dinopoulos) which sounded bracing throughout and avoided the off-putting tweeness that other bodies bring to the piece.
Onstage came the Australian Boys Choir – I think; these were the singers who wear the military-looking red jackets, but I think Dinopoulos referred to them as ‘the performing squad’. This group sang Paul Stanhope‘s Losing the Plot, a four-part suite to texts by Michael Leunig: Talking to My Shoe, Underpants anthem, La-La Land, and Lost the Plot. Piano accompanist Zachary Hamilton-Russell was put to gainful employment through this work, too enthusiastic in the first section for comfort although his part was active compared to the vocal lines which tended to be easily overpowered. I caught little comprehensible from the second chorus apart from the opening statement because the young singers were exercised staying in rhythm and on pitch so that little effort was put into projecting the words successfully. A similar fate befell the La-La Land section; the title recurred often, which was a kind of anchor, but the text retained its secrets even though the group sounded more comfortable with these pages.
The finale to Stanhope’s composition is a tango and the singers were quite crisp in their observation of the dance’s accents, their vocal lines sounding lucid for the most part. But I had no idea of their verbal content until I went back and listened to the piece again with the great cartoonist’s whimsical poems at my side. The whole exercise would benefit from a few more rehearsals, it seems to me, with an accent on enunciation.
After interval, the Consort returned with a highly charged version of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s setting of Christina Rossetti brief Summer is gone lament, in an arrangement for TTBB by (I think) John Bateson. This is not as easy as it looks with some none-too-subtle chromatic slides and a dependence on that feature for individuality. These singers made a fair fist of this mild, unsophisticated sample of Victoriana which is a few salons away from the melodic simplicity and appeal of Onaway! Awake, beloved. But there’s about 12 years between the vibrant generation of Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and this madrigal with a dying fall.
More assertive Britishness came next with the Vaughan WIlliams arrangement for TTBB of the English folksong Bushes and briars. Yet again, the reading was exemplary for its dynamic fluency and solid probity of line. My only doubts came with some of the top tenor line’s high Gs, e.g. in bars 17 and 18, which sounded a few millimetres short of going flat. This was followed by a difficult if dramatic work, Romanian composer Gyorgy Orban’s Daemon irrepit callidus in a TTBB version that gains in menace when compared to the online interpretations involving SATB forces. This work is a neat example of post-Orff rhythmic hammering in Latin; unlike Carmina Burana, it doesn’t last long – not quite cracking two minutes – and these men knew their work and delivered it with high confidence.
Finally, the Consort entered fully into the American collegiate stream with a groovy outing for Van Morrison’s Moondance, complete with doo-wahs and be-bops while the tenors played havoc with the original tune. But the syncopations were spot-on and the production values slick, such as you only get when real musicians bother to exert their skills on easy-listening material. Staying in character, the group then sang an interpolated encore with Julius Dixson and Beverly Ross’s 1958 hit Lollipop, complete with the original’s mouth pop punctuation. This bagatelle fell into the expected USA groove, carried off with ready skill, the whole accomplished without Dinopoulos’ direction.
Finally, the combined forces of the Institute – from the Consort, through the red-jackets up to the large group of primary-school-age tyros – came together for Chilcott’s two choruses, the first of which proved challenging for the youngest performers, probably because of its pace. As with The Wanderer at the recital’s start, it was difficult to decipher the texts, a bit easier to do so in the slower-paced anthem on Lincoln’s declaration abolishing slavery. Nevertheless, this last made a rousing sound, a call to arms over a righteous cause and an elevating conclusion to an impressive demonstration from this now-venerable institution, currently celebrating its 85th birthday.
O'Connell the Music 