Limelight

The Australian Chamber Choir’s Buckingham Palace comes to us with the spectacular pageantry and music of the funeral of Elizabeth II and Coronation of Charles III fresh in the minds of millions.

The program presents music principally performed at Coronations and funerals from the reigns of Elizabeth I to Charles III, including some of the many commissions. The opening piece, Rejoice in the Lord Alway, established a sound which was energetic but not overstated or pushed, and had an assurance and easiness of tempo and style – qualities heard throughout the concert. This often imparted a meditative quality to the event, even during the brisker pieces.

Douglas Lawrence assembled an ensemble of accomplished singers with a fine sense of their part in that great musical instrument – the choir. There was a shared understanding of style and fine attention to blend, tonal quality and intonation, leading them to sing as one. They sounded musically at ease with one another, as in Taverner’s Song for Athene, which was underpinned by a seamlessly breathed bass drone, above which the choral singing was assured yet restrained and calm.

This was followed by the most recent composition, Judith Weir’s 2022 Like as the Hart, the beautiful text sensitively sung, almost as if the singers were speaking to the listener, and followed by Vaughan Williams’ O Taste and See, in which soprano Kate McBride floated the opening solo, the lovely gentleness continuing in the perfectly imitative stepping down of the choristers’ entries. Lawrence created a breathtaking stillness, heard elsewhere in the concert also.

The choir moved to the basilica gallery for the second part of the concert during which the David Farrands Brass Ensemble played a sonorous version of Handel’s Air and Hornpipe, from The Water Music.

Organist Rhys Boak accompanied a number of pieces masterfully, including his own arrangement of The Old Hundredth. The fabulously grand introduction, for organ, brass and timpani, was at least as spectacular as Vaughan Williams’ well-known version.

SS Wesley’s Thou Wilt Keep Him in Perfect Peace was perfect for the ACC, and was glowingly warm and reassuring. Next came the magnificence of Stanford’s accompanied Coronation Gloria, and as a concert closer, Parry’s glorious I Was Glad, with its huge instrumental accompaniment, played superbly by the ensemble and organ. The choir cut through but this was a place where more percussive consonants might have created greater ‘electricity’.

This Sunday afternoon concert was hosted by Music at the Basilica as part of its concert series. The basilica is a splendid building in which to hear notes soar and shine while afternoon sun enters in coloured shards through the stained-glass windows of the ambulatory.

In programming over the years, Douglas Lawrence and Elizabeth Anderson often delight us with new and less familiar repertoire, including commissions, but in the case of Buckingham Palace, the music was familiar and loved by the audience – no bad thing at all! Douglas Lawrence created a beautiful performance, which will be repeated on Sunday 12 November at 3pm at The Scots’ Church, Melbourne.

BOOK NOW  for Buckingham Palace at the Scots’ Church at 3PM on Sunday 12 November