H Goodall

Invictus: A Passion

Soloists from The Sixteen; Christ Church Cathedral Choir; The Lanyer Ensemble/stephen Darlington

Coro Connections COR16165 58:02 mins In the New Testament, Gethsemane is a place of existential doubt and agonised soul-searching. In ★oward Goodall’s modern Passion narrative it is evoked in music of cheerful buoyancy, with chirpy pizzicatos and a twinkling piano obbligato, the words sung to a tune almost comical in its heedless levity. ‘Lamentation’, the second movement, strikes a more serious tone in its setting of a 19thcentury poem about a slave auction.

There is fine solo work from tenor Mark Dobell in ‘Invictus’, setting a poem by William Ernest ★enley. From placid beginnings Goodall builds ★enley’s paean to Victorian stoicism toward a peroration which aims to be stirring, yet feels facile in its stage-managing of the emotions. Kirsty ★opkins brings her fresh soprano to ‘The Song of Mary Magdalene’, where Goodall counterpoints lines by Christina Rossetti with Latin verses from John’s gospel and Isaac Watts’s hymn ‘When I survey the wondrous cross’. WB Yeats, Aemilia Lanyer, William Wilberforce, and George ★erbert all find their way into the text of the concluding ‘I will arise’, with more ★enley. With such verbal clutter, the coherence of the movement suffers. The choral singing is committed if occasionally scrappy, and the small chamber band accompanies neatly. Terry Blain

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