BEL A CAPPELLA : ‘ANCIENT LANDS’ @ ST AUGUSTINE’S CATHOLIC CHURCH BALMAIN


Featured image: Bel a cappella and Artistic and Musical Director Anthony Pasquill got their 2022 concert season off to a great start with this programme. Photo credit : Karen Watson.

In the lush setting of St Augustine’s Catholic Church in Balmain this moving concert  delivered seven innovative works, predominantly from the last fifteen years.

Celebrating a variety of text languages and clever textural use of the choir, this substantial programme championed an effective creation of successful successive soundscapes. Local composers Kate Moore, Alice Chance and Joseph Twist explored in their works a unique painting of beautiful and demanding choral densities.

Conductor Anthony Pasquill and members of Bel a cappella gifted us a pleasing range of modern choral gesturing. This was not only from the three  Australian works featured. It was also in satisfying evidence from superstar northern hemisphere choral composers Rautavaara, Ešenvalds and Eric Whitacre.

This offering travelled to the lands of ancient church music and returned with  techniques and moods excitingly refreshed. The programme was bookended with stunning newness of approach from two of our local composers.

The traditional idea of church procession and flow in life as well as ceremony was developed in Kate Moore’s Eclipsed Vision (2006). This opened the event with all vocalists in orbit around the church and congregation.

Above : Composer Kate Moore’s ‘Eclipsed Vision’ opened this concert.

Cycles of moving singers chose cards indicating new single notes to emit into the area on each circuit. This created a magical musical counterpoint with hypnotic choreography as Bel a cappella took possession of the acoustic and physical space.

At the concert’s conclusion following another manipulation of church practice, namely hymn singing was Joseph Twist’s Hymn of Ancient Lands (2016) which ended the colourful programme.

Here the 7th century latin text in the choir’s lines surrounded soprano soloist Margot McLaughlin’s phrases. Her nicely shaped solo lines emanated from the complexity in true hymn-like even,  steadfast tone, but in a new hymn accent of ancient English. This was cleverly pitted against the Latin.

Above: Bel a cappella celebrated the text setting talent of Alice Chance  (pictured) by perfoming her work from 2018, ‘Holy Dreaming’

Australian composer Alice Chance’s  Holy Dreaming (2018) at the concert’s centre was a layered treat of reiteration and word shaping. This work and its performance was a joyous tracing of the vivid thanksgiving text by First Nations Rev Lenore Parker (A Prayer Book for Australia 1999)

Chance’s intensity of musical examination, re-examination, and celebration of the English text’s internal rhythmic code were seamlessly realised in lithe discussion by the choir.

Woven throughout the programme were movements of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s virtuosic Missa a Cappella (2010-11). This setting’s artillery of effects, sweeping vocal vistas and multi-tracked choral comments took the musical mass to new heights and challenging contemporary extremes.

This demanding work was managed by the skilful vocal ensemble with breathtaking clarity and newness of nuance.

In collaboration with percussionist Josh Hill on marimba, the text from the Ute people of North America shone in complex overlap in Ešenvalds’  Earth teach Me Quiet (2013).  Conductor and choir carefully shaped the successive proverb-like affirmations and English text transformations with bold layers of yearning.

Above: Joseph Twist’s work ‘Hymn of Ancient Lands for divided choir and soprano was a stunning conclusion to this concert.

An exploration of scene and narative imbued the performance of American composer Eric Whitacre’s Sainte-Chapelle (2013). The work also gave us this concert’s most reverberant moments.

Intersecting lands of the ancient Latin language and the scenario of a modern girl experiencing the awesome chapel were vibrantly explored. The work was composed originally  for The Tallis Scholars and served here to showcase this capable choir.

This programme also delved into the twentieth century via Igor Stravinsky’s 1959 completion of Gesualdo’s  fractured score of Da pacem Domine. This inclusion enabled more verve, colour, contour and expert combination of ancient and new vistas by the choir.

As throughout the entire event, we were enticed in this work into the rewarding land of unaccompanied choral comment that this concert continually offered and celebrated.

The next Bel a cappella concert also promises to thrill us with premiere performances and Australian music, on August 21.