Choir returns from mini-tour of Italy
ROLL over Beethoven, listen up Gareth Malone... Charnwood Voices, the area’s leading and most durable amateur choir, is flying the flag to show just how much talent Britain really has got in choral music.
The choir has just returned home to Charnwood after a whirlwind three-venue mini-tour of the Tuscany region of Italy, where their expressive and skilful performances won appreciative and enthusiastic receptions from local audiences.
A standing ovation greeted the choir at the conclusion of the final performance – an accolade not easily achieved for a repertoire entirely of sacred music in church settings.
The choir, formerly the Shepshed Singers but now re-badged as Charnwood Voices, have been making their presence felt in Europe since 1998.
The Italian concert series was the choir’s 10th in a series of biannual tours that has taken in major cities from Paris to Prague and Bruges to Barcelona.
The singers showed the benefit of their experience on the road when ably recovering from an acoustic shock at their first venue in Florence, when the city’s world-famous Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, betterknown simply as the “Duomo”, threatened to swallow whole anything the 45-strong choir produced in its more measured paces.
As a consequence of the acoustic, Barber’s Agnus Dei (the American composer’s choral arrangement of his 1930s orchestral masterpiece) was in many parts lost to the building.
Some Durufle pieces suffered a similar fate, but under the intelligent direction of chorusmaster Nick Scott-Burt the choir decided to run with its winners and returned to its opening Bruckner Ave Maria, let- ting the sound soar to the rooftops and fall to earth in its own good time, a technique that proved brilliantly successful and must have been as spine-tingling for singer as it was for listener.
The choir really showed their strength at a fuller performance the next night in the cathedral of the beautiful ancient walled city of Lucca with a concert of sacred music by European composers from the Renaissance to the 20th Century.
It was one of those days where it “all comes together” and the choir caught the spirit (as well as the physics) of the San Martino cathedral, triumphing in piece after glorious piece.
Not surprisingly, Palestrina’s Tu Es Petrus felt particularly at home here, but so too did the very English motet by Charles Villiers Stanford, Beati Quorum Via – a work that went down so well it was run as the finale of the tour’s last concert in the town of Certaldo the following night.
Ironically but understandably in light of the hectic schedule, the choir had lost just a touch of their earlier lustre on that final night. But the audience would have none of that, they were on their feet and applauding their appreciation as the final notes died away.