KEY POINTS:
REVIEW
What: Musica Sacra
Where: St Matthew-in-the-City
Musica Sacra has built up a loyal audience for its disciplined and imaginative choral singing and a solid attendance at Sunday afternoon's Monteverdi concert was thoroughly deserved.
Basing the programme around the Italian composer's Missa in Illo Tempore, with its movements punctuated by various motets and other settings, Indra Hughes provided an intriguing toe-dip into music that gets scant attention in this country.
The Mass was at its strongest in the Kyrie, Sanctus and Agnus Dei sections, in which the singers created an enchanting weave of sound, the Sanctus almost mesmerising in its waves of glorious vocalising.
The Gloria and Credo were more testing. In the first, despite no shortage of energy, solo voices sometimes jarred when they emerged from the choral texture. The Credo had its tentative moments and patches where tone was not so scrupulously sustained, although Hughes made the most of the movement's dramatic potential, especially in the hushed Et incarnatus est.
The shorter Monteverdi pieces ranged from a robust Cantate Domino and a full-blooded Adoramus te, Christe in which the choir acquitted itself most creditably. A sprightly Beatus Vir ended the afternoon with buoyant, dancing rhythms and graceful instrumental interludes of the sort that charm you endlessly in Monteverdi's opera, Orfeo.
If there were moments when various groupings within the choir came through unevenly, it did not detract from the effect of the whole.
A small instrumental group led by Rosana Fea made a welcome contribution, clustered around John Wells on the liquid-toned Donald Barriball Memorial Chamber organ. The delights of Jonathan Le Cocq's theorbo, an exotic instrument like a giant lute, were as much sculptural as musical, although its delicate wash of sonorities contributed much feeling.
Finally, all praise is due to Wells' crisp and finely-shaded organ solos that gave a richer historical setting for the Monteverdi we were hearing. Improvisatory preludes by the two Gabrielis, uncle and nephew, were like olde improv rambles to lose oneself in. A Merulo Toccata and a Sweelinck Fantasia Chromatica were daring, forward-looking pieces, while a Cavazzoni Ricercar revealed the seeds from which mighty Bach fugues would eventually grow.
