Never mind affable London choirmasters cajoling school kids to sing for a BBC TV series, there is one man who can be held largely responsible for raising the bar for Scottish youth choirs in recent years. It was with the Junior Chorus of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, one of a handful of such organisations of which he has charge, that Christopher Bell made this contribution to Oran Mor's Monday evening concert series.
Quite a performance it was, too; the singing disciplined, the tuning secure and the music carefully shaped. Latter-day children's choirs have developed a tendency to sing in the pushed manner of West End stage wannabes; Bell, quite rightly, makes clear that he is having none of it. The 30-plus girls (and one boy) of the RSNO Junior Chorus produce a pure, unforced tone, old-fashioned maybe, but absolutely what is required in this repertoire.
The programme, as Bell succinctly pointed out in his introduction, had holy week in mind. The contrasting works also demonstrated the versatility of the choir from the direct simplicity of Mozart's Regina Angelorum to the angular, Eastern-Orthodox lines of the Salve Regina by Kocsar Miklos and the elegant three-part polyphony of Lotti's Agnus Dei.
The main work on the programme was Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, one of the great works of the Easter liturgy. The famously anguished opening chorus loses something in sonority with the plaintive baroque string lines substituted by the thoroughly modern sound of the piano, but the performance was no less impressive, especially given the contributions of the 10 soloists drawn from the ranks of the choir demonstrating that this isn't a group that carries any passengers.
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