Review of Gerald Finzi's Intimations of Immortality
and Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony

Wednesday 16th April 2008
Guinness Choir and Orchestra / Milne
NCH, Dublin
Michael Dungan

There was a double dose of impressive artistic courage in the Guinness Choir's choice of programme for its spring concert. First, the choir confronted the Irish collective blind spot for English composers. Big names such as Britten and Elgar are rarely programmed here, with composers from the next tier down - such as Gerald Finzi - rarer still. A choir would be reckoned brave for devoting half a programme to one of these and the other half to a sure thing. The Guinness Choir, risking box-office woes, went English all the way.

Second, the two pieces - Finzi's Wordsworth sterling Intimations of Immortality and Britten's celebration of the end of winter, the Spring Symphony - present considerable challenges to the choir, being unfamiliar and hard to learn.

Artistic courage was certainly vindicated on the first count, with the English programme drawing close to a full house. The outcome on the second count was more mixed. There is a huge amount of singing in both works, and the choir's valiant focus on getting all notes and entries right took a heavy toll on basics such as vowel sounds, which lost their quality, and enunciation of consonants, which was mostly weak, obscuring the text and undermining rhythmic vitality. These were not issues for the young choristers of the Palestrina Choir, whose singing was technically disciplined as well as pure and spirited.

The choir was at its best in big homophonic passages such as the tenth section of the Finzi, when it brought a real spirit of celebration to Wordsworth's delight in nature, and in Milton's 'The Morning Star' in the Britten.

Soprano Charlotte Ellett - standing in for the indisposed Julie Moffat - and mezzo Emma Selway were insightful in Britten's sampling of five centuries of English poets from Robert Herrick to W.H. Auden. In contrast, tenor Martyn Hill, who sang in both works, was remote and disengaged, almost void of any communicative value.

Conductor David Milne drew much fine playing from the orchestra, establishing a brooding, deeper-than-nostalgic wistfulness from the Finzi. Showcased instruments, such as the horn in the Finzi and the harps and trumpets in the Britten, were all very strong.

This was probably the Britten symphony's first Irish performance, almost 60 years on, for which the choir received financial support from the Britten-Pears Foundation.

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Review of Gerald Finzi's Intimations of Immortality and Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony

Review of Gerald Finzi's Intimations of Immortality
and Benjamin Britten's Spring Symphony