Cantata Singers once again in great voice

The Cantata Singers are undoubtedly the best all-round choral group in our community. One might hear better singing on occasion from another choir. There is Musica Divina, for instance, which specializes in early music and does it very well, but no one can match the Cantata Singers' combination of reliable technique and musicality, broad repertoire and ability to put together interesting programs.

Sunday evening's concert at St. Matthew's Church found the singers close enough to the peak of their form to make a fascinating program of Kodály and Willan a thorough pleasure. Healey Willan (1880-1968) was the first Canadian composer to achieve a solid, if modest, international reputation, as well as the first to leave us a substantial body of work that maintained a reasonable, if once again modest, level of inspiration.

His masterpiece is undoubtedly the unaccompanied An Apostrophe to the Heavenly Hosts. Conductor Laurence Ewashko led the Cantata Singers, along with a handful of singers from St. Matthew's, in a powerful and convincing rendition of this lovely work. Two lesser but significant works by Willan, Gloria Deo per Immensa Saecula and Coronation Te Deum, were sung effectively too.

Willan was one of the most conservative, and derivative, composers in the history of music. In much of his choral writing we can hear clear echos of Bach, Palestrina, and some Victorian English composers. In the Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue one can hear something of the harmonic vocabulary of César Frank. Aside from his conservatism, Willan had no musical identity of his own.

What a contrast, then, was the richly flavoured, deeply personal music of Zoltán Kodály that made up the rest of Sunday's program. Jesus and the Traders is a particularly complex and Hungarian-sounding realization of the familiar story, while his Missa Brevis for chorus and orchestra is more universal in its artistic vocabulary. Both works received solid performances.

The acoustics in St. Matthew's are, if not perfect for choral singing, certainly among the better in our area. In most respects it suits the Canatata Singers' sound, giving them a full-bodied bloom and a solid sense of presence. The acoutics do tend to accentuate one of the choir's problems, though: a tendency for the sopranos to sound strident near the top of their range.

Richard Todd is a freelance writer.