Grantham Choral Society performance of Verdi’s Requiem at Ely Cathedral

James Bone writes about Grantham Choral Society's performance of Verdi's Requiem at Ely Cathedral on Saturday (March 29).

Mounting a performance of Verdi’s monumental Requiem is no easy task, but it remains one of the challenges which every decent choir ought to try.

The forces required are huge – achoir divided into multiple parts, four soloists, large orchestra with full woodwind and brass section, percussion and symphonic string section – and the musical challenges presented by the composer equally vast.

This Requiem is really an opera masquerading as a sacred work, so all the performers get to present the entire gamut of emotion, ranging from sheer violence and malice to the most tranquil, restful, almost loving, passages. Everything, in fact one would expect from a late Verdi opera which this, really, is.

To achieve this task as their Spring Concert offering the Grantham Choral Society members very sensibly, and necessarily, joined forces with the Ely Choral Society and the Wymondham Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Andrew Parnell, at Ely Cathedral on Saturday evening, 29th March.

A suitably hushed opening allowed the combined choirs to set the mood for the first, Requiem, section followed by the entry of the soloists’ quartet. Probably the best-known section of the work is the Dies Iræ [‘Day of Wrath’] entry for full-choir pitted against the orchestra, fortissimo, with sopranos sustaining high pedal Gs as everybody else descends, pell-mell into a whirling maelstrom of sound.

One had to get used to the acoustic of the cathedral with this texture, as a long reverberation time tended to cloud some of the detail, particularly with some of the more precipitous string passage-work, but as Verdi sensibly uses this section three times in the whole Requiem it worked well.

A nice touch adopted for this performance was the use of large television screens affording the audience close-up views of choir, soloists and orchestra: it was fun watching the timpanist and syncopated bass-drum dramatically articulate their parts.

The real coup de théâtre, though, was the positioning of the offstage trumpets, for the Tuba mirum section, in the triforium of the North Transept of the cathedral – high above the rest of the performers and audience.

The effect was electrifying: exactly as Verdi intended, and the bass solo, Alastair Miles’ sepulchral phrasing in Mors stupebit [‘Death and nature’] superbly effected the change of mood to match the sentiment of the words.

Soprano, Tara Bungard, and mezzo-soprano, Cassandra Manning gave the duet, Recordare, [‘Recall’] full measure of Italianate operatic pathos and sentiment, as did the tenor soloist, Thomas Elwin, in the Ingemisco [‘I groan as one guilty’].

Similarly, all sections of the combined choirs achieved an operatic range of emotional colour and tone, from the pleading Salva me [‘Save me’], and the vitriol and spite of the Dies Iræ, to the intricate fugato passages in the Sanctus prefaced by military fanfares in trumpets: this was especially good, as was the final fugue in the Libera me [‘Deliver me’] in grand choral style.

It would be invidious to try and tease-out the individual choirs and sections as both the Grantham and Ely Choral Societies when combined made a most impressive sound.

It was pleasing to see keen supporters of the Grantham Choral Society in the large audience. Having trekked all the way to Ely, they will not have been disappointed, and neither was I. In all the time I have been following and reporting on the concerts of this choir I have never heard a better or more moving performance than this. The concluding Libera me [‘Deliver me’] sung by Tara Bungard and the combined choirs was perfectly awe-inspiring and quite literally raised the hackles on my neck.

Of course, the unsung heroes in the preparation and delivery of this concert were Grantham Choral Society’s regular conductor, David Humphreys, and his accompanist and, not least, on this particular occasion in having had to arrange the logistics of rehearsing and of temporarily moving an entire choir to the Fenland – no easy task - were members of the choir and the committee including, especially, their splendid chair, Gill Charles who is stepping down from the post after nine years’ meritorious service.

Conducting a choir is one thing: keeping it ship-shape and ‘in line’ quite another! Let us hope that the ‘return match’ will be just as magnificent.