Handel's great work in assured hands

Brian Kay. Photo / Supplied

Auckland Choral signs off its 156th season next week with the expected Handel Messiah.

Soprano Katherine Wiles last sang with the choir in 2007, but her fellow soloists are new: Auckland countertenor Dean Sky-Lucas, Wellington bass David Morriss and Keith Lewis, New Zealand's most celebrated tenor on the international stage.

And, for the first time since taking up the post of music director in 2008, Uwe Grodd passes the baton to Englishman Brian Kay.

Kay is well known to Radio New Zealand Concert listeners, his programmes having the smooth urbanity that comes from 25 years of BBC broadcasting. He is far from locked into the Brit choral tradition - a few years back, his series on close harmony singing dipped into recordings by the Hi-Los, the Merry Macs and the Inkspots. "That series was a labour of love," says the 67-year-old.

Kay was a founding member of the renowned King's Singers, leaving the group in 1982 "after 14 years of pioneering missionary work", he laughs. "It was time for me to go on."

A new career as conductor started with "10 years as chorus master with the Huddersfield Choral Society getting things going. One thing led to another and now there's a whole list of choirs I've worked with."

Kay is particularly proud of his involvement with the Leith Hill Musical Festival. "I've conducted there for 17 years but can't see me catching up with Vaughan Williams' 50."

He has also taken on the Really Big Chorus, a group of enthusiastic choral all-comers which mounts an annual Messiah in the Royal Albert Hall in London. Kay talks of a database of 30,000 singers, of whom 4000 turn up on the day.

"My job as a conductor is to make massive gestures ... I can hardly move my arms the day after. Out of the 4000 singers, half are going to know the work pretty well. We take the same come-and-sing philosophy with other works like Carmina Burana, The Dream of Gerontius and it's remarkably successful.

"Nowadays people are not always prepared to give up the same night, week after week, for rehearsals, but are quite happy for it to take up a day or a weekend."

In England, he handpicks his soloists, often auditioning them from prize-winners at the Royal College and Royal Academy, with one of his favourites being Kiwi bass Paul Whelan. Kay admits he is wary of those who "over-decorate, as too many toddles can be a little tiresome, especially if they are the kind of ornamentation that I don't like".

But talking to this Englishman, you begin to feel that Handel's great work is indestructible. Kay first sang in the oratorio as a schoolboy and then as a choral scholar at King's College, Cambridge. "It has a wonderful freshness because every performance is different."

Too many, he says, do not acknowledge the power of Charles Jennens' words, "so brilliantly put together from the Bible and the Common Book of Prayer that it took Handel only 24 days to set them to music. If you can do something with those words, the music takes care of itself."

Performance

What: Messiah, with Auckland Choral

Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, Monday and Tuesday at 7.30pm