London Choral Sinfonia, Waldron, Smith Square Hall review - contemporary choral classics alongside an ambitious premiere

The London Choral Sinfonia are a very impressive group, a professional choir who are churning out terrific recordings at a breakneck pace – I reviewed their latest release of Malcolm Arnold on theartsdesk only last week – as well as a busy schedule of live concerts and educational outreach.

At Smith Square Hall last night there was another aspect of their work on view, a commitment to new music in the form of a premiere of a large-scale new piece and, if I had my reservations about it, that commitment and ambition is still very much to be applauded.

The first half of the programme was on more familiar territory: Caroline Shaw’s and the swallow and Eric Whitacre’s Cloudburst must be the two most widely-programmed new choral pieces of the last 20 years. The Shaw is gently understated, the choir finding a rich sostenuto sound in the insistent chorale that constantly hovers. The LCS’s conductor and artistic director Michael Waldron led with fluid gestures for the smoothly flowing music – but was more dramatic in the extraordinary Cloudburst that followed. As always with ubiquitous pieces, it can be helpful to scrape away the familiarity and try to hear with fresh ears. This performance certainly persuaded me it’s a truly striking piece, and the work of a distinctive compositional voice, for all that some of its features have become a bit clichéd over time. The introduction of resonant percussion – thundersheet, bass drum, bells – in the final section, as the choir replicate a desert rainstorm, is a true coup de theâtre, and the ending packed a punch in this powerful reading.

The choir line-up was extremely strong, the 28 singers including some of the biggest names – and voices – on the scene, and they were augmented by three brilliant soloists for the premiere of Edward Picton-Turbervill’s Out of Eden. This is an ambitious 40-minute work for the choir and soloists, plus piano, organ, violin and percussion, dealing with what the composer describes as modern society’s “intrinsically flawed” relationship with the natural world, which is a consequence, as he sees it, of “the zero-gravity derangement of end-stage capitalism”. It’s impassioned, but not an upbeat experience.

Out of Eden is a kind of Bachian Passion, using a mixture of biblical texts – mainly Old Testament – alongside some meditative lines and, to finish, a poem by Philip Larkin. But there seemed to me two flaws in the text. First, it seemed a very church-based response to what doesn’t seem to me to be a churchy problem – I don’t think our current ecological crisis is either caused by, or will be solved by, religion, or religious words. Second, and more importantly, the balance between biblical words and non-biblical reflection seemed out of kilter. In Bach’s Passions, the narrative provides the backbone, but the heart of the music is in the composer’s setting of Picander’s poetic responses. Here, Picton-Turbervill occasionally intersperses his own words, and uses the Larkin at the end, but for me the long recitative-like passages needed more leavening, and I really wanted to hear voices from the modern world.

The soloists were absolutely first rate. Tenor Ed Lyon took on the Evangelist-type role with irreproachable diction and a welcome lightness. Baritone Hugo Herman-Wilson (pictured above left) was brilliant as the voice of God, by turns lyrical and portentous, surrounded by a choral halo. Jessica Gillingwater was crystal clear in her utterly focused sound, and violinist Michael Foyle’s obbligato lines danced around the vocal parts. And there was lots to like in the music, with Picton-Turbervill’s control of pacing and large-scale architecture well-judged. The moment of audience participation – we were invited to sing a repeating F while the choir wove harmonically ingenious chords around us – was great. And the “Valley of the Dry Bones” section was stark and chilling. But there were also some misjudgements: a big climax in the choir, the sopranos soaring, ungratefully masked by percussion crashes, and a “Lamentations” section which felt stylistically out of place.

The final section, though, a setting of Philip Larkin’s “The Trees”, offered a glimpse of what the piece could have been. Working with metered verse a different kind of music emerged, the choir singing in unison a winning melody that rose to a thundering last chord, and left me wishing there had been more of that: more varied poetic voices, more contemporary perspectives on a contemporary crisis, and less reflexive reliance on the bible.

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