Lammermuir Festival: NYCoS Chamber Choir
Loretto School Chapel, Musselburgh - 11/09/22
The Chapel of Loretto School in Musselburgh was the elegant venue for the eagerly awaited debut concert of the newly-formed Chamber Choir of the National Youth Choir of Scotland on the afternoon of 11th September, as part of this year’s Lammermuir Festival. The Chapel boasts tiered seating on two sides facing into the nave, a fine organ at one end and a baby grand piano at the other. The 22 choristers were conducted by Christopher Bell and accompanied on organ and piano by Michael Bawtree.
For Benjamin Britten’s ‘Rejoice in the Lamb’, the choir was ranged at the organ end and accompanied by that instrument. The settings of 9 poems by Christopher Smart, a tormented soul of the late 18th Century, former classical scholar, incarcerated in a lunatic asylum taking refuge in an inner world of faith, cover every emotion from despair to ecstasy, constantly searching for meaning through belief. From the start of the performance the ensemble sound was perfectly blended, the diction flawless and the dynamic range staggering. This is an elite expertly trained ensemble displaying astonishing artistic maturity. The fourth song, taking delight in the antics of a cat and mouse as a manifestation of worship, featured expressive descriptive narrative singing of great clarity and beauty by soprano Emily Kemp and alto Olivia Mackenzie Smith, followed by a soaring meditative tenor solo delivered with great warmth and expressive skill by Alexander Roland. The final sequence was introduced by a bass recitative performed with equal clarity and great breath control by Christopher Brighty. This work, commissioned by the same Northampton churchman who commissioned Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, was the perfect vehicle for announcing the arrival of this extraordinary ensemble on the musical scene. It will not be forgotten by any present at the performance.
The choir moved to the altar end of the church, ranged behind the piano, for James Macmillan’s ‘Culham Motets’, a series of five a cappella motets with a stylistic fusion informed by organum, plainchant and Renaissance polyphony, but with a liberal infusion of Macmillan’s own radiant post-modernism, including aleatoric high-register vocal effects for female voices in mimicry of the sound of flowing water. Virtuosic solos were delivered by tenor Lewis Gilchrist and sopranos Lorna Murray and Emily Kemp.
Vocal mimicry, this time of the sound of warm autumn rain, also featured in Caroline Shaw’s ‘And the Swallow’, performed first after the interval. A setting of verses from Psalm 84, the scoring of the choir into two antiphonal groups was fully exploited by the performers to create a warm, consoling ambience that was quite magical.
The emerging underlying theme of the programme, that of the appreciation of nature supporting a deepening of faith, and vice versa, was consolidated by the final work in the program, Jonathan Dove’s ‘The Passing of the Year’. Christopher Bell introduced the work with quotations from its text emphasising the inescapability of death, irrespective of social status or wealth, even for kings and queens, poignant for many three days after the death of the United Kingdom’s longest reigning monarch. The piano accompaniment drove a sensation of the relentless passage of time, while the full choral writing was punctuated by memorable solos from alto Morven McIntyre and tenor Jack Mowbray.
NYCoS Chamber Choir has arrived and is here to stay, enriching Scotland’s world of music.