Cloudburst Review

Full To Bursting - the Orpheus Choir make it easy to see why Eric Whitacre is a poster boy for American choral music

What: Cloudburst, Music by Eric Whitacre, Daniel Levitan, Moreten Lauridsen

Where: Wellington Cathedral of St Paul

When: June 24

By: Roger Wilson

Around the world, large choirs are in decline. Fortunately, no-one told the Orpheus Choir. They are in great heart and Cloudburst, their imaginative programme of American choral works, attracted a generous-sized audience that clearly enjoyed the music as much as the performers did.

Wellington Cathedral of St Paul has a troublesome acoustic, but its music director and conductor for this concert, Michael Fulcher, has its measure. Recent adjustments in Orpheus personnel have resulted in a choir 80 strong and the customary imbalance between the numbers of men's and women's voices is scarcely an issue. Spread out wide in the three ranks across the cathedral transept, the choir made an excellently integrated sound ideal for this sort of music.

Although his work has yet to be performed extensively in New Zealand, Eric Whitacre is a poster boy for choral music in the United States and it's easy to see why. Three Songs Of Faith, settings of characteristically idiosyncratic ee cummings poems, immediately displayed the composer's talent for word setting and tone colouring, often achieving harmonically striking, yet comfortable to perform, effects by layering straight-forward vocal lines into tone clusters and bitonal chords.

Similarly, it's no surprise his Cloudburst has become enormously popular. Whitacre's technique of creating a complex sound world from relatively simple components illustrates wonderfully the evocative poem by Octavio Paz. While the piece never resorts to mere gimmickry, the choreographed raising of hands, a thunder sheet, clicking of fingers and slapping of thighs create an extraordinary atmosphere of an impending thunderstorm with heavy drops of rain. Soprano Barbara Graham's brief solo was telling, as was Linda van Milligan's declamation of the Spanish text.

A rarity -- and a logistical tour de force -- was Daniel Levitan's Marimba Quartet. A pity, with such fine players and a barrage of instruments capable of extraordinary effects, that the piece, while easy on the ear, was bland, almost soporific.

After the Whitacre, the second half was a slight anticlimax. Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna is a substantial, tightly argued non-liturgical requiem drawing on a variety of Latin sacred texts. As in the Whitacre pieces, the employment of canons, an ancient cantus firmus and other ecclesiastical forms was never at the expense of manageable vocal lines, which the choir handled confidently, especially in the ecstatic Veni, sancte spiritus. Originally scored for choir with orchestra, Lux Aeterna is also written for organ. Despite Richard Apperley's expert playing, the work seemed to make less of an impact in this version, and, good as the performance was, there were longueurs. But the most electric moment of the evening was the total silence before final applause began, a welcome contrast to intrusive clapping in other recent concerts and a fitting acknowledgment of a most satisfying concert.