Zadok the Priest

Reviewer Clive O'Connell
March 21, 2005

Melbourne Chorale
St Paul's Cathedral
March 16

For the first series concert from the Melbourne Chorale this year, the accent was regal with lots of coronation music. The night took its title from one of the coronation anthems, Zadok the Priest, written by Handel for George II. Along with that familiar and majestic work came a lesser-known member of the set of four, The King Shall Rejoice, distinguished for its benign central movement.

For the night's second half, artistic director Jonathan Grieves-Smith employed his organisation's larger group, the Melbourne Chorale Symphonic Chorus, in Mozart's Mass in C, K. 317, nicknamed the Coronation although it's doubtful if the work had much to do with a royal occasion. The choir gave this score a generous performance, a congenial breadth and mix of vocal levels maintained throughout the longer sections like the Credo which manages to impress as both expansive and focused.

In both parts of the program, the Chorale enjoyed the services of a well-balanced quartet of soloists, particularly the hard-worked soprano Jacqueline Porter who found a persuasive interpretative mode, one without dynamic explosions or attention-grabbing but setting an admirable standard mirrored by her colleagues - mezzo Kerrie Bolton, tenor Robert Stewart, and the impressive baritone of Derek Welton.

For all the musicianship shown by the participants and some unexpected highlights in the program's first half from the smaller Melbourne Chorale Ensemble, like the airy tenor timbre in Zadok and the crispness of the sopranos in the other anthem, the night suffered from the drawback of having no orchestra.

David McSkimming, one of the most accomplished repetiteurs and accompanists in the country, gave an underpinning to the Handel and Mozart works but the inescapable impression was of a rehearsal, where the choir enjoys the piano's support and initiation before matters get serious and the orchestra moves in.

Despite McSkimming's elegant and precise work, the results sounded half-done.

Moreover, the piano spoke all too often in front of the choir, as though McSkimming were still trying to hurry along those opera singers that he has had to persuade over many years into something resembling the correct metre.

Stowed away among these shortfalls was the Ensemble's interpretation of Rejoice in the Lamb, Britten's sympathetic and moving setting of verses by the "mad" British poet Christopher Smart. Here, McSkimming moved to the St Paul's organ and, for the night's only time, we heard a work performed as written. One of the longer readings I've heard of the piece, it nevertheless produced a generous lilt in the Hallelujah segments, a vitality from the four soloists and a sustained power at those wrenching pages where Smart confronts his own disordered state of mind.

Nothing to do with any royal occasion, but this craftsmanlike score and its attractive realisation made the highlight of a chequered night.


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