Rites of Passage
Subscription Concert One
World tour of mixed emotions
The Advertiser, 24th April 2007THIS first concert of the 2007 Adelaide Chamber Singers subscription series provided a whimsical, magical mystery tour of musical rites of passage worldwide, from German Requiem to Livonian incantation, from courtship to mass.
Tour guide — alias director — Carl Crossin cleverly kept his passengers guessing as he drove them through darkest night to brilliant morning sunshine, engendering feelings of uncertain hope at the program’s start but leading eventually to ebullient good humour in the final numbers.
Such are the wonders of musical suggestion. And such were the interpretive powers of his youthful, 12-strong, scaled-down ACS on this occasion in the polished resonances of St John’s that listeners’ own rite of passage involved weathering the very real, bleak, black homilies of Schutz’s expansive German Requiem, which occupied the concert’s entire first half with its melancholy and woe.
But dawn was breaking in the choir’s empathetically stylish presentations of three settings of the Agnus Dei by Victoria, Palestrina and Byrd, a neat piece of programming, in which surprisingly Palestrina won hands down for sheer spit and polish, plus some stunningly intense finely tuned final bars of the rarest quality.
Then we were in sunlit pastures with the splendidly candid, rhythmically taut humour of romantic madrigals by Sermisy, di Lasso and Jannequin followed by other worldly ritualistic folk music of Livonia and Ingria evocatively set by Vejlo Tormis. Thoroughly warmed up by now and in their element, Crossin's group permeated the soul of this music producing interpretations of rapturous intensity.
