Cantata Singers do Fauré justice

Cantata Singers
St-Benôit-Abbé, Hull

For most of Christianity's two millennia, there has been a strong emphasis on the prospect of perdition. The traditional Mass for the Dead which, in music, we normally call the Requiem, has a text that's heavy on the horrors of Judgment Day and abject pleas to the Almighty to spare us from the eternal torment our sins have earned us.

Horror doesn't sell well nowadays, unless it's on movie screens, where we can be certain of a happy ending. When they wrote requiem masses, composers used to concentrate on the damnation aspect, or at least what it might represent metaphorically in the human condition. Verdi wrote one of the supreme masterpieces of music in the form.

Late in the 19th century, though, composers like Gabriel Fauré discovered that, by omitting much of the traditional text and including more comforting lines from the periphery of the liturgy, they could create the kinder, gentler type of requiem that the Cantata Singers of Ottawa sang last evening in St-Benôit-Abbé in Hull.

The comforts of the evening were many, in fact, from the quality of the music by Fauré and Eleanor Daley to the quality of performance which, enhanced by the fine acoustics of the venue, was truly outstanding.

Daley's Requiem follows the example of Brahms, who chose his own scriptural quotations rather than using the liturgical texts, and of Britten who introduced secular writings into his War Requiem. It is the final word in feel-good requiems, and effective in what it sets out to do.

The level of inspiration isn't entirely consistent throughout the work but, at its best, it is very beautiful indeed. One of its movements is a setting of Carolyn Smart's celebrated, sentimental Remembrance. It is too complex musically to do justice to the simple loveliness of Smart's lines.

The Cantata Singers seem to have reached a new level of solid excellence. Their traditional virtues, fine tuning, blend and balance, were at their best yesterday.

Soprano Dominique Cimon and baritone Gary Dahl sang their parts reliably and generally to good effect, though not as positive an effect as the choir was producing.

If Daley's contribution to the genre is one of the most recent upbeat requiems, Fauré's was the original, and undoubtedly the greatest.

Yesterday's performance was generally successful. The choir was wonderful, the soloists once again reliable and the contracted orchestra more than adequate.

The balance between the choir and orchestra were not always perfectly worked out, however, and the violin solo in the Sanctus sounded thin and a little disagreeable.

Still, the performance was good enough that the listener could respond to the score's uplifting spirit.