A year is an awfully long time for any festival to run, so you can forgive Kings Place’s Earth Unwrapped series if it strays a little from its forest and mountain paths along the way. With some clever conceptual footwork, this concert of choral classics by the Aurora Orchestra and the BBC Singers could just about claim a toe-hold in the topic, but the real theme was altogether less abstract and more interesting: pieces you know, in versions you don’t.
Set aside the tenuous nature-connections of Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb (a whole menagerie of animals) and Mahler’s sumptuous, cosmic farewell to the world “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”, and we were left with a short but curious collection of musical ‘What ifs’.
Swapping Mahler’s solo mezzo and orchestra – an unbroken charcoal horizon-line of voice, backlit by orchestral sunset – for unaccompanied 16-part choir is bold. Does Clytus Gottwald’s experiment come off? Not entirely, but it’s a fascinating shift, not so much of texture as axis: forcing the ear to follow lines vertically as they creep from voice to voice, now emerging in duet, now silhouetted in solo, now melting into a hum. A challenge even for supreme technicians the BBC Singers, it never quite found its glow in the pristine acoustic of Kings Place’s Hall 1.
The Britten – a miniature cantata whose musical invention keeps pace with poet Christopher Smart’s hallucinatory visions – traded its usual organ accompaniment for chamber ensemble in Imogen Holst’s lively arrangement. There was a joyously wriggling “cat Jeoffry” from clarinettist Peter Sparks, castanet-hoofs clattering for “Nimrod the mighty hunter” and plenty of low percussion rumblings adding an underlying disquiet to a piece whose joy was still the dominant note. Conductor Nicholas Collon kept up the propulsion, though we missed much of Smart’s glorious text in smudged diction.
The Royal Opera House's Jenufa is unforgettable
Read MoreBut it was Fauré’s Requiem – unexpectedly – that was the real oddity. With no violins at all, lots of low strings, brass, chamber organ and an underused harp, John Rutter’s edition of the composer’s long-lost 1893 score is idiosyncratic. The effect is darkly soft-focus (no violins or high woodwind to break through the blend with their sonic italics) but lacking in bite. A Mahlerian account from Collon pulled choir and orchestra around dramatically to little emotional effect. The Dies Irae was less Day of Judgement and more rainy day at a picnic; the dazzling closing vision of paradise was dulled.
On paper this concert was a done deal; in performance it felt anything but. Perhaps that’s what you get when you mix safe-pair-of-hands the BBC Singers and risk-takers, Aurora: earth not so much unwrapped as knocked off its axis.
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