While other choral societies still perpetrate Handel's Messiah
at this time of year, David Temple's ever-enterprising Crouch
End Festival Chorus went about its own business on Saturday
with a programme nattily entitled "Tango Clasico!", and
attracted a good crowd.
Constant Lambert's The Rio Grande opened proceedings. The
Barbican platform's modest size caused the young London
Orchestra da Camera's percussion section to spend much of
the evening exposing themselves near the front; their leader
had an invisible solo behind the piano in the Lambert, as well
as being uncredited in the programme. Both singing and
playing, while admirably clean, were a bit British and
well-behaved. Elizabeth Shepherd, the choir's accompanist,
dispatched the solo piano part without much Latin brio. In an
arrangement for piano, bandoneón and orchestra of Astor
Piazzolla's Libertango, the bandoneón player, Hector Ulises
Passarella, showed how these things should be done.
In Misa Tango by Luis Bacalov (who also arranged the
Piazzolla and was present at this concert), Passarella was,
by British stiff-upper-lip standards, indulgently effusive,
supplying a body gesture for practically every semiquaver.
That seemed about right for this 68-year-old
Argentinian-Jewish composer's setting of parts of the Mass in
Spanish, which was written in 1997 and here received its
British premiere. The bandoneón is joined by two solo singers
– the mezzo Emma Selway (who also had a small role in the
Lambert) and the baritone Nicholas Garrett – as well as the
choir. All doubtless enjoyed themselves in this overlong,
rather anonymous-sounding Latin-style amalgam; but only the
(again uncredited) solo cellist, who also had a prominent part,
rose fully to its tackiness.
The most individual and moving music of the evening came
with the British premiere of Philip Glass's Itaipú. The title
means "singing stone", and the work's four continuous
movements set texts based on the Guaraní Indians' creation
myth surrounding the Paraná river, which flows between Brazil
and Paraguay. Inspired by the hydroelectric dam on the river,
which the composer visited before this huge structure's
completion, this work for chorus and orchestra expertly spices
the style of his opera Akhnaten with the Latin-American
idioms characteristic of his approach in the late 1980s, when
the work was written.
The result is some of Glass's best music of the last two
decades, particularly effective in the climax of its later stages,
when constant metric dislocation meets some audacious
chromatic shifting in an incantatory slow burn of magnificent
proportions. The Crouch Enders aren't a perfect choir and, like
most, suffer from a dearth of power in the men's department.
But these singers rose to many of the challenges of this
composer's highly effective writing for massed voices. What a
pity that the magical conclusion was spoilt by some idiot
applauding too soon. [Hear, hear! - Ed]
