Lawrence and his chamber choir returned to the basilica with a program that wonderfully reflected the breadth of this excellent ensemble.
Vocal Art from the Fifth Continent
Australian Chamber Choir in Bonn Minster
By Fritz Herzog
The Australian musician Douglas Lawrence cannot be considered a stranger to Bonn. As an organist, he has appeared as a guest at the great Klais organ of the Minster Basilica. In 2007, he founded the Australian Chamber Choir (ACC), with which he last visited St Remigius in 2019. The Corona pandemic forced a break, but now the traditional biennial European tours of this top choir have been resumed. A close friend of cathedral cantor Markus Karas, Lawrence and his chamber choir returned to the basilica with a program that wonderfully reflected the breadth of this excellent ensemble.
The program began with the motets Tu es Petrus by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina and Jubilate Deo by Giovanni Gabrieli in front of a well-attended nave. The overpowering acoustics in the cathedral served to interfere with the polyphony as well as the comprehensibility of the text. Nevertheless, it is impressive how the male and female voices balance and blend. And that all four voices are technically at their best. But with the ACC, this is always a given. One searches in vain for a typically Australian idiom, through contemporary works such as Christine McCombe’s Power in Stillness. With its marvellous restraint, the work seems to have been inspired by Arvo Pärt. It is a similar story with Gordon Kerry, whose Alchemy sets Shakespeare’s Sonnet No.33.
At the centre of the program was the double-choir Magnificat Op. 164 by Charles Villiers Stanford, which was brilliantly realised in its full tonal splendour. The first three songs from Frank Martin’s Cinque Chansons d’Ariel, from Shakespeare’s comedy The Tempest, were performed before Ludwig van Beethoven’s eight-part Memorial Song Op 118 paid homage to the local genius. And once again Beethoven had his say with an arrangement of Ode to Joy. Before that, Johann Sebastian Bach’s double-choir motet Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied BWV 225 was heard, but complex textures are hard to follow for acoustic reasons.