2008

A great fresco in sound

Painting a great fresco in sound depicting humanity trembling on the brink of Judgment Day, Verdi’s Requiem speaks for all of us. The scenes it evokes are apocalyptic, the pleadings from soloists and chorus are touching in the faith that an eternity of light might lie beyond.

And all of this is conveyed in music which takes no prisoners, where extremes of terror summon extremes of vocal and instrumental expression, and this is perhaps a work where amateurs, unpolished and honest, can convey its deepest essence.

Sunday’s account from the Massed Choirs of Making Music West Midlands Societies, together with the part-time but expert Chandos Symphony Orchestra, came very close to the heart of the work. Remarkable was the maintenance of pitch in the notorious unaccompanied vocal passages.

If anything stood in the way, it was the gusty performance from some of the professional soloists, plangent instead of persuasive, stentorian when the composer asks for the sweetest tones, and lacking in the hard, desperate bitterness of lower register which is such a Verdian characteristic.

But mezzo Anne-Marie Owens was outstanding in her many contributions, surely a tribute to her long operatic experience.

And it was the operatic experience of conductor Michael Lloyd which was the crucial factor in the success of the evening. His speeds were adroitly paced, his shaping of vocal lines, whether from soloists or chorus (and how lightly he made this huge corpus sing when appropriate), was considerate and expressive, and his perception of the underlying drama — how close much of this music is to Aida, not least that opera’s concluding Entombment Scene — brought home all the anguish and hope implicit in Verdi's score.

The Chandos Symphony Orchestra, under Michael Lloyd, gave a large audience a memorable evening at the Malvern Theatre on 9 March. To open the concert, the orchestra was joined by Aydin Önaç as soloist in Rachmaninov's Second Piano Concerto. Mr Önaç's technical command, his rapport with conductor and orchestra and, above all, his expressive insight and shaping of phrase made it amazing to discover that he has a quite different 'day job' — as headmaster of a large London school. The orchestra was on good form, by turns expansive and energetic over the sweep of this exhilarating score, but also — for example — capturing the troubled atmosphere that surfaces in parts of the celebrated slow movement. If Aydin Önaç was, with his thoughtful and humane virtuosity, the star of this item, orchestra and conductor then found a mountainous vehicle for their talents in Bruckner's Seventh Symphony. The difficulty of this music lies not so much in the immense length as in structures that — except perhaps in the magical scherzo — ask players and conductor to bind disparate ideas and moods, from the contemplative to the heroic, from intense introspection to celestial rhapsody, into one overarching whole.

That the Chandos succeeded so well is a tribute to the players and to their remarkable conductor. Michael Lloyd communicates a sense of shared artistic endeavour beyond the orchestra to the audience itself. He conjured fine sound from every section of the large band, and created a unity, in ensemble, dynamics and rhythmic drive, that encompassed this epic work's myriad aspects, from the heartfelt cantabile of the slow movement's elegy to Wagner, through the dancing, careering episodes of the scherzo to the finale where, as at times in earlier movements, it was as if the listener, and the whole auditorium, were enveloped in radiant sonority.