Fauré Requiem by Candlelight
St Martin-in-the-Fields, Thursday 18 January 2007

Anca Dumitrescu
posted 25 January 2007

The celebrated music venue St Martin-in-the-Fields welcomed the Brandenburg Sinfonia and the Encoro Choir for a musical programme centred on the late 19th century French composer Gabriel Fauré. Whilst the choir delivered a fair interpretation of Fauré, the uneven performance of the orchestra left the listener in disarray.

The first part of the concert featured orchestra works by Mozart, (Salzburg Symphony no.3), Grieg (Holberg Suite op.40) as well as Fauré's Cantique de Jean Racine op. 11 for choir and orchestra. The overall performance of the orchestra proved unsatisfactory, as technical and musical interpretation issues greatly diminished the quality of the performance. The Salzburg Symphony may not be the most profound and inventive (harmonically speaking) of Mozart's compositions, but it is a piece of virtuosity, which needs performers with an excellent technique. The absence of perfect coordination between the strings was especially visible in those passages where the main theme is played successively by the first violins, the second ones and finally by the altos. In fact, dialogues between the strings sounded awkward and lacked a natural flow. On the other hand, the interpretation of Grieg's Holberg Suite - a suite mostly based on 18th century folk dances - totally overlooked the joyful aspect of the piece. Instead, the listener was absorbed by the comic spectacle of the conductor desperately trying - through disproportionate and vigorous gestures - to animate the amorphous and slowed down orchestra.

Despite a relatively poor beginning, the rest of the concert was substantially emboldened by the Encoro choir interpretation of Fauré's Requiem op. 48 in D minor. Under Lincé's direction, the rich and complex harmonies of the Requiem were well rendered by the homogeneous yet distinctive altos and tenors, while the sopranos provided the necessary impetus to lead the melody. While the bass voices were at times hardly perceptible and thus deprived the choir from having its harmonic depth, Lincé succeeded nevertheless in creating a sensible balance between the different voices. Also noticeable was the performance of 'Pie Jesu' by the Romanian soprano, Eliana Pretorian. The fluidity and purity of Pretorian's singing preserved the aerial and a-temporal character of the score originally written for a boy soprano.

It was highly regrettable that the dialogues between the choir and the orchestra were akin to a dialogue of the deaf, however. In the forte passages, the power and resonance of the choir almost muted the orchestra parts. Similarly, the way the solo violin integrated into the orchestra could barely convince the listener. The attacks with which the solo violin would begin its phrases were not always in keeping with the orchestra, but rather random attempts apparently uncontrolled by the conductor. Were all these shortcomings the sheer result of haste and poor rehearsals? Probably yes, would be our guess.

The venue of St Martin in the Fields, which can offer a certain (religious) gravity and yet intimacy is a prestigious place, for both musicians and music-lovers. However, prestige only cannot compensate for the absence of regular and demanding rehearsals, which are the only 'voie royale' towards perfect musical performances.