photo: Simon Weir-www.simonweir.com

Breathtaking sounds for the choir
make evening one to remember

Saturday 9th July 2011

Finchley Choral Society

The Parish Church of St Mary the Virgin, Primrose Hill

Carmina Burana, Carl Orff

On the beach at night, Richard James Harvey 

For many people Carmina Burana will ever be associated with a TV ad for Old Spice. Perhaps this is why is it sometimes regarded as a bit of a novelty piece: and it is - I can think of no other work on this scale that is remotely like it.

From the instant that the breath-taking O Fortuna breaks around round this lovely church, we know that we are entering a very different world of music. Orff himself describes the work as "Profane songs for singers and vocal chorus with instruments and magical pictures."  A magical evening indeed.

Monumental understates this amazing piece and FCS (working beautifully with the excellent Finchley Children's Music Group) seized the opportunity to show how brilliantly they can handle such a complex and demanding work.

If Carimina Burana was a painting it would be a Breugel (think Carnival and Lent) or, in its really dark moments, a Bosch. Orff took his texts from a manuscript collection of the 13 century thus setting them to music 700 years after they were written. In it he has woven simple monastic echoes (without the polyphony of later ages), rustic dances and all the bombast he can muster using a seriously well equipped percussion section and little else.

One minute lyrical, another primal, the choruses adapted beautifully to the demands of the work. Conductor Grace Rossiter had instructed the choir, especially the men, to sing from the gut and to project as they never had before - at times they seem genuinely surprised by the sounds they unleashed on this appreciative audience. The work of the soloists was superb: I watched as one member of the audience was simply transfixed at the beauty of Jane Forbes' delivery of Stetit Puella.

The evening had started with the world premier of a work by Richard James Harvey to mark his 25 years as the choir's accompanist. Based on Walt Whitman's poem On the Beach at Night, it was a beautiful, reflective piece performed with much affection by this excellent choir.

Visit www.finchleychoral.org.uk for news of their December programme of works by Haydn, Mozart and Schubert.

David Winskill. Ham and High. Thursday July 14th 2011.