WHATEVER else it may be, the Cork International Choral Festival, which ended on Sunday, is certainly a substantial event. More than 100 choirs including schools' choirs, took part this year, with visiting choirs from 12 different countries. Besides the main events, there were indoor and open air recitals in shopping centres, churches and venues outside Cork city, one of them featuring a new work by Gerald Barry, The Ring.
At last year's festival I wasn't always sure whether I was attending a festival or a competitive feis. This year's festival contrived successfully to be both. Festival director John Fitzpatrick gave us a more varied and entertaining festival by expanding the festival fringe to include concerts by visiting choirs in venues such as St Fin Barre's Cathedral. William Burges's imposing edifice provides an excellent acoustic - and ambience for small choirs, and the recitals by the Hallgrimskirkja Choir from Iceland and the Madrigalkor from Kiel in Northern Germany remain my own fondest memories from this year's festival. And not only mine - the former group won P.E.A.C.E. Trophy, awarded by the audience to their favourite performers, possibly on the strength of this performance, while the latter group were awarded the Schutz Perpetual Trophy for the best performance of a work by the 17th century composer of religious music, Heinrich Schutz, a prize which was withheld last year.
The festival deserves credit for promoting the great heritage of early religious music for unaccompanied choir by stipulating that each entrant in the International Trophy Competition has to include a piece of sacred Renaissance polyphony, and by holding a plainchant competition, won this year by Gaelscoil Phortlairge from Co Waterford out of a record seven entrants. This counteracts the tendency of some choirs to rely on rather insipid folksong arrangements.
YET to some extent, the festival remains a good, old fashioned feis, with competitions and prizes for different categories. During the day, Cork City Hall hosted contests for school choirs, junior choirs, and equal voice and mixed voice adult choirs. Festivals like this are about giving people a chance to sing, and the choirs that I heard sang with feeling, while the standard was high in the National Chamber Choir competition on the Sunday, where each choir must sing a 16th century madrigal and an original 20th century work no folksongs. The winners this year, the St Cecilia Singers from Dublin, chose a madrigal by Gesualdo, an interesting choice.
The evening gala concerts featured the main event of the festival, the International Trophy Competition, where three Irish choirs were joined by choirs from Northern and Eastern Europe, all countries with strong choral traditions, varying in size and age from the veteran 83 strong Colne Valley Male Voice Choir from Huddersfield to the very youthful Tallinn Music High School Choir from Estonia. This year the prize went to another Estonian group, the Arsis Chamber Choir.
These concerts remain a somewhat uneasy mixture of concert and competition. Perhaps because it is felt that two hours of unaccompanied singing might be rather austere, the programme is varied with non competitive singing and dancing, provided this year by two English groups, a ladies' barbershop quartet and an Indian women's dance troupe from Leicester. Frankly, one was glad to see these extraneous items kept to a minimum, if only because they tended to make an already substantial programme unreasonably long. The real strength of the gala concerts was the high standard of the performance. Mostly, it was good music well sung could one ask for more?
WELL, yes. I would have liked either the programme or the presenters to have given even the briefest one line resume of the texts. I suspect one of the reasons why the audience responded so well to the barbershop quartet was that for once they had a notion what the singers were singing about. The presenters in the gala concerts did tell us about the texts of the new works commissioned for the Contemporary Music Seminar but, as it happens, the programme prints these particular texts in full.
I was also unhappy about the rather freaky exhibition pieces selected by some choirs, which seemed more designed to show off the choir's discipline than to make music, and which might have been written with competitions like this in mind.
The other area which could be looked at is the Seminar on Contemporary Choral Music. It is an excellent idea in itself, and the festival numbers works by Walton and Milhaud among its past commissions, but although this year's pieces by David Cox and John Buckley were expertly written and performed, the style of the two seminars held in the Aula Maxima of UCC is best described as academic. The hall was very cold, which didn't help. The third seminar benefitted from a change to St Fin Barre's and from the natural warmth of the composer Petr Eben and his music.
