The National Chamber Choir concluded its "Composers under the Influence" summer season of hour-long, early-evening concerts at the National Gallery last Thursday.
The featured composer was Conor O'Reilly, a long-term member of the choir's bass section, and now also composer in association to the NCC.
He devised a programme that led from Palestrina and Monteverdi up to two of his own pieces, the Pie Jesu from a Requiem, and a new work, Landscapes, a setting of T.S. Eliot, that was specially commissioned for the concert.
As a composer, his preoccupation seems to be with choral music - I've only ever seen his work programmed by the NCC - and his Pie Jesu, though very limited in ambition, makes effective use of some of those unforced dissonances which can sound so haunting in choral contexts.
The rather more demanding, piano-accompanied (Fergal Caulfield) Landscapes was performed with the choir spread out in a single-line curve, all owing a lateral sound-movement for the word-painting of "swing". The idea, as elsewhere in the piece, was rather stronger than its implementation, and, on a first hearing, the landscapes seemed unable to rise fully out of a greyish similarity.
The effect may have had something to do with the performance, too. The conductor, Colin Mawby, was clearly concentrating, and not without success, on chordal beauty. The benefits were most strongly felt in Durufle's Ubi caritas and Bogoroditsye Dyevo, the sixth movement of Rachmaninov's Vespers.
In the earlier works, by Monteverdi, Josquin, and, particularly, the Stabat Mater for double choir by Palestrina, the effect was one-dimensional enough to rob the music of some its essential character.
