DAVID HILL, Musical Director of the Bach Choir, who has just conducted the choir in a world première of the Requiem by Carl Rütti at Winchester Cathedral, is heir to a remarkable tradition.
Formed in 1876 to perform Bach’s B-Minor Mass, the Bach Choir still enjoys a tip-top reputation among English choral societies. Sir David Willcocks presided over the choir’s fortunes for nearly 40 years, and some still relish an even earlier golden age under Dr Reginald Jacques.
Vaughan Williams conducted the choir in the 1920s; before that, Stanford steered it for two decades, and Parry, one of its founding members, provided his sublime Milton setting Blest Pair of Sirens to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee in 1887.
A former organist of Winchester and St John’s College, Cambridge, and now chief conductor of the BBC Singers, David Hill brings a harvest of choral experience to match this noble pedigree. Under him, the Bach Choir launched Sir John Tavener’s Song of the Cosmos (at the BBC Proms) and the Gloria by Naji Hakim, in the composer’s native Lebanon. Their new recording of Howells’s Hymnus Paradisi (Naxos 8.570352) bids fair to rival Sir David’s (EMI CDM 5 67119 2).
Whether the congenial new Requiem by the prolific Swiss choral composer and pianist Carl Rütti is destined to be ranked with works by Howells and Parry only time will tell. But there were positive indicators. In Winchester’s spacious acoustic, David Hill engineered an inspired programme to introduce it.
Mozart’s motet Ave Verum Corpus, sung by a choir of 170 voices, might sound to some like a musical nightmare. Far from it. As hushed four-part textures folded in over the strings of the Southern Sinfonia, there descended a sense of mystery that was later echoed by both the riveting opening and unexpected, birdsong-tinged conclusion to the new Requiem. In this increasingly Berliozian address to the verum corpus, natum de Maria Virgine lay an allusion to the most important Requiem of all.
This rapt atmosphere was maintained in Mozart’s Laudate Dominum, from the Vespers Mozart penned in 1780 for his ecclesiastical Salzburg masters, in which the pellucid soprano Katharine Fuge performed blissful floating trills and effortless deer-like leaps across the musical stave. Pure rapture.
Especially ingenious was the inclusion of Clytus Gottwald’s choral arrangement of Mahler’s setting of Friedrich Rückert’s “I am lost and dead to the world” (“Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”). One of Mahler’s many quasi-Requiems, it is brilliantly realised for vocal forces: light, floating tenors, anchoring low basses, and stratospheric sopranos teased out the ethereal Straussian timbres of this ravishingly beautiful setting.
It was an apt idea, too, to programme Metamorphosen, Strauss’s grief-stricken lament for doomed Germany and shattered Munich, composed in 1945. Despite its Bachian amplitude, the work’s unpredictable flow can feel almost as opaque as Schoenberg. The not-too-slow pacings and intense string tone couldn’t quite emulate the emotive power of Klemperer’s agonised Philharmonia reading: here it never ached, as the work must. Yet this was a thoughtful, articulate handling of Strauss’s gorgeous and mesmeric work for 23 strings, offering a rightly sober prelude to the new Mass.
Carl Rütti’s oeuvre, like Mahler’s, has often dwelt on death. What I admired in this Requiem was the flair of the choir’s delivery, the tenderness of the solo singing (Katharine Fuge, joined by the baritone Edward Price), and the imaginative, unusual approach that Rütti takes, like his versatile Classical predecessors, to setting the texts of the Latin missa pro defunctis.
What lingers most is the extraordinary disembodied effect of Rütti’s opening (Introitus), with the unaccompanied soprano — albeit in clacking high-heels — advancing down the aisle, intoning alone. A pleading interlude for double-stopped cello (the magnificent Moray Welsh) heralds the Kyries; and a glistening aubade (or perhaps crepusculade) concludes the work, as a taped sound like a blackbird or songthrush disconcertingly folds in and blithely rules the roost, as if hovering in Winchester’s rafters.
The hushed Lux Aeterna matched the Bach Choir’s sensitive Ave Verum for stilled pianissimo singing. The nicely disjointed triple-time “Hostias” was tensely atmospheric, just as the eerie upward unfolding of a lightly chromaticised plainsong-like sequence, an image of the soul advancing to be embraced by God (it is no surprise that Mr Rütti has set the poems of Rilke) informed the preceding Offertorium, and is echoed in the Sanctus.
Rather than racing through the Requiem text, Rütti (despite an overstretched opening, with shades of slightly tamed Duruflé and an ingenious emphasis on the words “omnis caro”), uses text repetition judiciously: not least, in the lulling slow lollop of the In Paradisum’s final journey (“Et perducant te . . . chorus Angelorum”) to a heavenly Jerusalem.
With laudable additions from harp (Tanya Houghton) and organ (Jane Watts), this very singable new Requiem setting is broad and breathes. Delicate and varied, it proves a considerate and considerable treatment of a key devotional text. Mr Rütti has arguably made his case: there is no reason why other choral societies should not pounce on it.
The Bach Choir sings Rütti’s Requiem in Douai Abbey at 7.45 on Saturday 1 March, and Bach’s St Matthew Passion in the Royal Festival Hall at 11 a.m. on Sunday 9 March. They perform Vaughan Williams’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in the Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House, on Thursday 27 March at 8; and three performances of Verdi’s Requiem in Melbourne on 3-6 April.
www.thebachchoir.org.uk
www.ruettimusic.ch
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