January 2000
Thame Chamber Choir
Conductor: Roger Moon
Wendlebury Winds
ST MARY'S CHURCH, THAME, 21st JAN 2000
Roger Moon’s excellent ensemble claims to works in a “relaxed atmosphere”. Possibly though to get it all right on the night these singers must, one fancies, put more zeal and steel into rehearsals than they care to let on. To these ears, anyway, the most immediate virtue of their performance at St Mary’s Church, Thame, lay in the shapely discipline they brought to the strict counterpoint and restrained ornament of Sweelinck’s motet Hodie Christus natus est, and it was this same discipline, focussed later on the fine-tuned dynamics of Mendelssohn’s Am neujahrstage or the soft dissonances, full of personal feeling, of Howells’ A spotless rose, which assured such affecting results. The choir’s partners on the programme, Wendlebury Winds, joined with it only for the final work, Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit.
Until then, the forces mustered of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons and horns (a pair apiece) proved most piquantly apt to handle lyadov’s orchestral Eight Russian Folksongs, arranged in this version by J W Brown. How better to evoke that lurking Russian sadness that through bassoon, oboe and bass oboe, or a tipsy merrymaking slav than by the piccolo or flute? The Wendlebury players grasped these matters most convincingly; and all that threw them, really, in Ravel’s Pavane was Lance Bakers’ rather horrible arrangement, in which Ravel’s light-footed, coaxing ostinato ingloriously dragged, and congested textures filled his open, glimmering space.
The Charpentier piece, however, proved a minor triumph for all. Folk carols furnish the themes of this midnight mass, but none should suppose its jaunty meters denote a musical naivety. It is riven, often by unusual harmonic tensions; hurdles which here both choir and players cleared in real style, the singers especially holding cohesion and tone, even at those extraordinary moments when the vocal line appears to over-ride and flaunt, the basic harmony.
Oxford Times