The National Chamber Choir's new series at the National Gallery began last Thursday evening. It was the first of five "Connections" concerts, three with guest conductors from Brazil, the USA and Argentina. As the choir's artistic director Colin Mawby explained, each programme deals with connections of history and influence between composers, times and places.
In this concert, the main link was between Vaughan Williams and early 17th-century English composers, especially Byrd. But there were others. All the early composers - Byrd, Philips and Dering - were Catholics, and their works in this concert were Latin settings. Stanford was staunchly Protestant, but his Three Motets Op. 38 are also settings of Latin; and his pupil Vaughan Williams sought to recapture some of the characteristics of Byrd's polyphony.
The most striking performances of the evening were in the interlude between the choral items. Kate Hearne (recor ders) and Richard Sweeney (theorbo) played pieces from the late 16th and early 17th centuries by Castello and Ortiz. Stylish, rhythmically animated and utterly spontaneous in character, they had an authority which rightly drew warm applause from the large audience.
It was fascinating to hear the differences between Byrd's and Stanford's settings of Justorum animae and between the Kyrie and Gloria as set by Byrd in his Mass in Five Parts and by Vaughan Williams in his Mass in G minor.
The choir's style of performance, which concentrated on restrained feeling and on vocal line and tone, suited the later music better. Byrd's Civitas Sancti, for example, sounded less like a breast-beating lament than an exercise in wan melancholy. But this was an interesting concert, and some of the later ones should be too, for they explore comparatively unfamiliar territory.
The National Chamber Choir's "Connections" series continues at the National Gallery on June 28th