The English choral tradition took the stage in the red robes and white ruff collars of the Choir of Winchester Cathedral under conductor Martin Neary, in a performance at New York City's Alice Tully Hall in Lincoln Center on April 6.
This all-male tradition, relying on boy trebles and contraltos, is heir to a wealth of literature, and the chorus presented a widely varied, representative body of materials ranging in style from the sixteenth-century polyphony of William Byrd (1543-1623), Robert White (1534-1576), and Thomas Weelkes (1575-1623) to the challenging work of contemporaries John Tavener and Jonathan Harvey (born 1944 and 1939, respectively) and the renowned Benjamin Britten (1913-1976).
The only non-English choral selection present was "Der Geist hilft," one of six famous motets of Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750), which, notwithstanding its engaging character, might have been omitted without serious detriment.
The first three selections, Byrd's "Laudibus in Sanctis," White's "Christe, Qui Lux Es et Dies," and Weelkes' "O Lord, Arise," certainly were performed with stylistic correctness and taste; but the chorus, either because they were tired (they had performed at Saint Thomas Episcopal Church on Fifth Avenue earlier in the day) or because they were as yet unaccustomed to the acoustical firmament of Tully Hall, were only good, and did not "set the air afire" with the sort of enthusiasm that transforms very good work into compelling work.
My suspicion is that it was at least partially the unfamiliar acoustic that created problems in the opening moments of the program, inasmuch as there were points at which Neary's choristers realized certain aspects of the Byrd with a delightful sensitivity to its potential for drama (within the very contained English sacred music context), irrespective of the fact that the overall work did not succeed as well as it might have. One such point was the treatment of the vigorous syncopated rhythms with which Byrd colors the Latin words Cymbala dulcesona (sweet-sounding cymbals), which, as the accented upbeat of the first syllable passes from part to part, the chorus executed with delightful precision, yet without such emphasis as might have disrupted its contribution to the contextual whole.
There was not a single selection that did not end at least reasonably strongly in the entire evening--and some ended with real power. But tuning problems within the body of certain works did beset the chorus occasionally--again, most notably in the earlier portion of the programs, when Neary and his ensemble seemed not yet to have established a confident relationship between their sound and the Alice Tully resonances.
There is a particularly haunting quality to the vibratoless sound applied by many adherents of the English tradition to the plainsong style integral for centuries to both Catholic and Protestant worship services in England, and the plainsong passages in the White were very beautiful, with the usual touch of emotional austerity that typifies the chant on which the work is predicated. The tuning throughout much of the other parts of this selection, however, was shaky, and did not become firm until the end of the work.
As for the fourth selection, "Jehovah, Quam Multi Sunt Hostes
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