Calm voices in the dark

Jun 18 2007 By Thomas Hall, The Journal

Newcastle Bach Choir at the King's Hall, Newcastle - It's something of a rarity to have two composers sat side by side at the same concert. But there they were, the one just turned 80, the other less than half that age, both listening intently to the Newcastle Bach Choir performing their music.

Alongside them sat Mary Lovell, widow of Percy who was director of the choir for the last 12 years of his lectureship in music at Newcastle University. Last year, the Bach Choir commissioned a piece in memory of Percy Lovell and a poem found copied into a notebook, Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach, became the text for the young Durham-born composer Will Todd's Let us be True.

Todd writes more opera and dramatic oratorio than anything, hence the restless undertow of lower strings keeping Arnold's brooding philosophy in mind, however ecstatic the voices above. But when he does hold still, you feel something of extra significance is being said, the sighing refrain `Ah, love, let us be true to one another', a magical piece of word painting on the lapping waves and a calming voice of reassurance in the darkness.

South African composer John Joubert moved to England in 1946 and continues to accept commissions in his 80th birthday year. Written for the 40th anniversary of Cappella Novocastriensis, in December 2000, his An Hymne of the Nativity came in a newly revised version for the Bach Choir.

17th century poet Richard Crashaw couples the image of sunrise with the birth of Christ, the shepherds waking the sun to witness the Nativity. Joubert's is a rich and varied sound world where dissonance adds expressive depth and rhythm is at once complex and natural sounding. But however involved the detail, the larger form is always clear, the `sunrise' theme marking the route to a blazing climax.

Conductor Eric Cross and the musicians gave a generous and mixed programme, opening with Janácek's The Lord's Prayer, soprano Janette Brass and the choir convincing me, at least, with their singing in Czech. There was Arvo Pärt's Fratres and By the Waters of Babylon, Britten's Simple Symphony and an exuberant Antiphon, from Vaughan Williams's Five Mystical Songs. But somehow they all seemed to complement one another in text or musical mood.