Review published in Somerset County Gazette March 28th 2008

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‘My Harp is tuned to Mourning’

Taunton Camerata,  conductor Peter Leech (organ)

St Mary Magdalene Church, Taunton,

Saturday 15 March, 2008

It would be difficult to imagine more beautiful music for the eve of Holy Week than the Spanish sacred works performed by the Taunton Camerata in their concert at St Mary Magdalene, Taunton, last Saturday.  The concert was called ‘My heart is tuned to mourning’ - Biblical words from motets setting the outpourings of Job.

It was the Camerata debut of new musical director, Peter Leech. He brings with him an impressive track record in choral conducting and musical scholarship, and fully lived up to expectations.  Frequently conducting with one hand and filling in on the chamber organ with the other, his movements are clear but with a fluidity which effectively shapes all the subtleties of the musical lines.  He drew a distinctive sound from the choir, and played the organ solos with assured technique aligned with a real feel for the music.  Under his direction the Camerata can enjoy a bright future – watch this space!

Leech drew the repertoire for the concert from the Golden Age in Spain and Portugal – three of the composers were flourishing at the time of the Spanish Armada.  At this time the epicentre of church music was in Rome, and it was there that Victoria, the greatest of the composers represented in this concert, spent much of his career.  The greater distance composers moved from the Holy City the less they obeyed the conventions.  Thus this Spanish music is often crowded with new ideas and expressive devices which Palestrina, the supreme Italian composer in Rome, would not have allowed to interfere with his sense of musical symmetry.

The composer Padilla moved to Mexico, and wrote eyebrow raising music there, as we heard.  Guerrero composed passionately, influenced by external factors as his life progressed, but it was Victoria whom today is mentioned in the same breath as Palestrina.  His Requiem is a ‘must’ on the short list for a desert island collection. 

Like Monteverdi’s Vespers it is a unique work for a special occasion, and where its words are in the first person the music is much more immediate than in the main movements of the Mass. The opening movement (setting another passage from Job) has the dance-like immediacy of a madrigal, but the following movements have the plainsong settings flowing through them in one voice while the other voices seize each other’s phrases in continual imitation.  They are at times very demanding, especially for the tenors.  Tenors can be a luxury these days but the Camerata three would surely wish for a doubling in numbers in music as difficult and exposed as this.

I would have preferred to have heard the men (rather than the women) singing the plainsong that it is intoned before the main movements – for me it suggests something more priestly.  There were brief moments when the choir were stretched by the sheer difficulty of the music, with tone and intonation wavering, but the overall effect was very persuasive.  Leech sought a forward and focussed sound, which worked for me – I was reminded of the upfront primary colours of Spanish organs from the next generation.

In performing this music today, compromises have to be made – a big renaissance church has a much more forgiving acoustic than St Mary’s, and will provide its own finish to the phrases. Mixed voice choirs have to sing the music at a higher or lower pitch from that in which it was composed in order to suit the range of their voices, and this means that the singing cannot be tuned as the original might have been.  As it was, the choir instinctively sought more just tunings than the organ’s at times.  Even the notes are sometimes in doubt – conventions obvious to the composers’ contemporaries can be ambiguous to us.

The biggest hurdle of all is that none of the music was written for concert performance, but for use in services.  To place successive movements back-to-back and to concertise them puts demands on the music it was not designed to take.  It is to Peter Leech and Taunton Camerata’s credit that they devised a concert which proved to be most satisfying in repertoire, in length, and in performance.

© Ian Carson 2008