Compelling a cappella in North Hants village

NSF: Voces8
at St Martin’s Church, East Woodhay
on Thursday, May 24

Review by LIN WILKINSON

Voces8, firm Festival favourites, returned with an eclectic but cohesive programme spanning music from the Renaissance to the 1950s.

This was a compelling a cappella performance, the capacity audience treated to a sublime blend of voices, sumptuous vocal textures and great expressiveness.

A polyphonic thread ran throughout the first half. Some pieces were sung in linked sets of two or three, often from different historical periods, but with much of the music enhanced by being performed in a church setting.

A spirited account of Croce’s Buccinate, “an Italian banger”, opened the evening, with superb solo and ensemble singing. In a reflective piece by Tallis, the singers harmonised over a single, plangent melodic line. This was linked with contemporary composer Alec Roth’s Night Prayer, a meditative, spiritual account.

From the English Renaissance, Gibbons’ Drop, Drop, Slow Tears featured rich, low harmonies, and was teamed with Arvo Pärt’s The Deer’s Cry, the soprano line answered by the lower voices. Superb controlled singing here, with crisp diction, and the eight-beat silence at the end integral to the piece.

There was glorious vocal light and shade in Chicago-based Kevin Allen’s neo-Renaissance piece; polyphony and sound colour in Schütz; and yearning, descending vocal phrases in the Rheinberger mid-section.

A slow, plaintive treatment of a 13th-century Icelandic text set to music by Sigurbjörnsson was followed by Holst’s Nunc Dimittis, a joyful crescendo of voices at the end. We were now firmly in the realm of 20th-century choral music.

The second half opened with an extended piece by Monteverdi, deeply felt and expressively sung, written as a tribute to a beloved young singer who died at 18. Sung by five voices, it was both a lament and a celebration, the singers using their whole range and power.

The madrigal Draw on Sweet Night by British Renaissance composer Wilbye exploited both major and minor modes, and reflected the theme of the evening’s performance. In Arthur Sullivan’s moving The Long Day Closes, always sung when a member of D’Oyly Carte died, the melodic and harmonic patterns put us unmistakably in late nineteenth-century musical territory, its gently expressive ending fading almost to a vocal whisper.

Voces8 are a versatile vocal ensemble in the best possible sense, showcased by their finale featuring 1940s and 50s jazz. Each singer in turn added to a feather-light but insistent percussive line, with scatting over syncopated doo-wap vocals.