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4 hours ago
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Voces8 are 20 years old this year, but with so many speeches and so much goodwill floating around the sold-out Barbican, this birthday concert felt more like a wedding. It was certainly a family celebration on one level: the main MC was Barnaby Smith, who co-founded this agile vocal group with his brother Paul and is still its countertenor and artistic director, while Paul is CEO. And there were several old friends of the ensemble among the composers.
The first half showcased the group in its usual format – eight singers, a cappella. It started with Buccinate in neomenia tuba by the Italian Renaissance composer Giovanni Croce, which, expertly sung, felt like an establishment of their credentials: crisp, poised and fast, the Italian skipping off the singers’ tongues.
The first half was otherwise full of 20th- or 21st-century music, rounded off with some tightly delivered arrangements of Cole Porter and Nat King Cole, but concentrating on more reflective, recent pieces, of which the most effective was probably Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow, which plays with some gently evocative fluttering effects at the end. Strikingly, the music that was more than a century old – Elgar’s Nimrod, arranged by John Cameron to fit the Lux Aeterna words from the Requiem mass, or Bogoroditse Devo from Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil – sounded no more old-fashioned than most of the works by living composers. That says less about Elgar and Rachmaninov and more about fashions in choral music, with a safe, contemplative, slightly Disneyfied style – the kind of thing the choir sings in the film of Frozen – having become today’s default.
There was some more ambitious recent music in the second half, in which the core lineup was joined by, variously, 18 alumni members, the eight singers of Voces8’s apprentice programme, violinist Jack Liebeck, and the BBC Singers, who remain an inspiration for every aspiring choral group. Kristina Arakelyan’s An Ode to the World and, especially, Roxanna Panufnik’s Love Endureth brought a welcome dose of punchier, more rhythmically driven music, and pieces by Jonathan Dove and Ken Burton also made an impact, but it was two old choral favourites, William Harris’s Faire is the Heaven and Charles Wood’s Hail Gladdening Light, performed by all 40-odd singers on stage that were the highlights. It’s rare to hear a professional choir this large outside an opera house, and the sound they created was thrilling.
