Birmingham Festival Choral Society * * * *
at Adrian Boult Hall
Review by Richard Bratby
Sometimes it's easy to work out where the rehearsal time went. Britten's 1937 radio cantata The Company of Heaven is an ambitious undertaking for any amateur choir, even one as accomplished as Birmingham Festival Choral Society.
Its demands are extraordinary. The work's 45-minute span encompasses spoken narrations, shouted choruses, complex choral melodramas, and A Thousand Thousand Gleaming Fires supposedly the first music Britten ever wrote for Peter Pears (Joshua Ellicott sang it here, with keen sensitivity to the colours of Emily Bronte's words).
So it was no real surprise that Haydn's Little Organ Mass seemed under-prepared. A top-heavy choral balance, and a tendency for the choir to drift flat at the ends of sustained phrases were the main failings in a performance that certainly had its good points - like a poised, radiantly sweet Benedictus from soprano Philippa Hyde - but, overall, felt merely pleasant rather than vibrant.
That all changed in the Britten. From its very first entry, the chorus seemed galvanised - there was clarity, a new dynamic range, and a crackling energy in its singing.
Conductor Patrick Larley steered his forces deftly through the score's complexities of balance and texture, and the narrators, Gill Larley and Stephen Purcell, delivered their lines with dignity and expression.
Britten's final chorale (set to a wondrously transfigured Old Hundredth) was sonorous and spine-tingling.
But the high-point of the evening came in Britten's setting of a passage from Revelation - spat, shouted, whispered and snarled by the men of the BFCS.
It called to mind Barbirolli's famous comment during a rehearsal of Gerontius: "You're not bank clerks on a Sunday outing, you're souls sizzling in hell!" He'd have had no complaint with this lot.
