Review: York Cantores; St Olave's Church, Marygate, York (From York Press)

Review: York Cantores; St Olave's Church, Marygate, York

1:21pm Monday 16th March 2009 in Search By Martin Dreyer

NOT for the first time, three of York's choirs contrived to schedule simultaneous concerts on Saturday.

But York Cantores offered a particularly adventurous programme. With a new conductor, Peter Collis, enjoying only his second outing in charge, they looked a good prospect.

So it proved, eventually. With two masses by living composers side by side, the menu was hardly a marketing man's dream, potentially alluring only to close relatives and sacred music anoraks. But pared down to a tight-knit 18 singers, the newly resurgent Cantores were clearly hungry for the fray.

If Purcell's 1685 setting of I Was Glad was more enthusiastic than refined, the laid-back approach boded well. There was no hint of restraint in Vaughan Williams’s exciting setting from the Book of Ezekiel, A Vision of Aeroplanes. With Thomas Leech proving more than equal to its exacting organ part, it was sung with immense confidence, not to say accuracy.

Judith Bingham's Mass (The Road to Emmaus) perhaps suffers from an excess of ambulatory plod, framed by sombre organ solos and making little of any joyful possibilities. But the Gloria had its moments and the central motet, Their Eyes Were Opened, was stirringly done.

Roxanna Panufnik's Westminster Mass uses an alternatively appealing and frustrating harmony that drifts too easily into impressionism.

She adds bells (here Francesca Rochester) to the organ accompaniment, clouding the Kyrie but colouring textures elsewhere.

The choir tackled it with the meticulous zeal that flavoured the whole event.