The Creation with St John’s College Choir

In celebration of St John’s College Quincentenary Britten Sinfonia joined the choir in performances of Haydn’s The Creation in St John’s College Chapel, Cambridge and St John’s Smith Square, London.

The Times
Classical Source

The Times (T2), Richard Morrison
Concert The Creation St John’s College, Cambridge

4 stars

Haydn’s joyous oratorio might depict an act of creation even more important than the foundation of a Cambridge college, if that’s possible. Nevertheless performing The Creation was a wonderfully apt musical way of celebrating the 500th birthday – or quincentenary, as they say in Cambridge – of St John’s College.

True, the college’s world-famous chapel choir of male students and trebles is a comparatively modern innovation, barely more than 330 years old. But the half-millennial anniversary is wisely being used to secure this wonderful ensemble’s future with the launch of a Choral Foundation Campaign that aims to raise £5million by 2015. That won’t be a moment too soon. Running the choir cost the college a staggering £1million a year, and the higher-education funding cuts have forced even venerable Oxbridge institutions to think the unthinkable about where to trim their own budgets.

This performance didn’t quite showcase the musical virtues of an all-male choir as intended. A winter lurgy depleted the boy trebles, and so – shock horror – four female undergraduates were infiltrated to bolster the top part. In five centuries, is that a first? Either way, if you closed your eyes and listened to the beautifully tuned treble line you would have been hard pressed to detect any gender difference.

A bigger problem was the relative smallness of the choir when set against the exuberant Britten Sinfonia (the wind principals in particularly flamboyant mood), plus Haydn’s far from skimpy orchestration of the choruses, and the opulent resonance of St John’s Chapel. Andrew Nethsingha, the conductor, might have considered asking the instrumentalists to adopt a lighter, more detached 18th-century style so that the voices had more chance of coming through. But his tempos struck a sensible balance between the ecstatic and the sane. And towards the end – when the choir really let rip – Haydn’s majestic fugues sounded thrilling.

I didn’t warm to Rebecca Evan’s soprano solos: some fine full-bodied tone, but a squealed top C early on, woolly diction and too many sentimentalised swoops up to the pitch. The men soloists, however, were terrific: Allan Clayton in gloriously vibrant voice, even when taking his impish embellishments up to a crystalline top B; and Neal Davies evoking the exotic Book of Genesis menagerie – flexible tiger, sinuous worm, immense leviathan and the rest – irresistibly pungent enunciation and superb vocal control. Hear them o it all again on Friday at another grand St John’s – in Smith Square, London.

Classical Source, Mark Valencia

“Quincentenary” is a grand word and a grander landmark. Even in a country as steeped in history as Great Britain, there are few establishments venerable enough to celebrate its half-millennium. St John’s College, Cambridge, though, is pure pedigree Tudor. For the last fifty of its 500 years the college has won worldwide renown through its countless broadcasts and recordings. During George Guest’s epic tenure as Director of Music (1951-91) the choir became known for its blend of a ‘continental’ treble sound and a notably rich male-voice timbre, thereby earning itself a special place within the English choral tradition – a pre-eminence it enjoys to this day. Among the choir’s early recording successes was a fine series of Haydn masses that have long been cornerstones of Decca’s catalogue; so to mark the quincentenary with logic as well as style, Guest’s successor-but-two, Andrew Nethsingha, turned to this talisman-composer for a celebratory performance of “The Creation”.

The performance was a strong one, underpinned by Nethsingha’s joyous tempos and by some refined playing from Britten Sinfonia in quasi-original-practice mode (although Maggie Cole’s discreet fortepiano was the only ‘period’ instrument in its ranks). All three soloists were of the first rank: Allan Clayton was in fervent voice as Uriel, while great Wales was represented by Rebecca Evans and Neal Davies in strongly differentiated guises, first as Gabriel and Raphael, then as Eve and Adam. Evans was guilty of excessive scooping at the start of several phrases; but her tone ravished the ear and her birdsong effect on “And cooing calls the tender dove his mate” was wittily charming. Davies, meanwhile, communicated like a minstrel storyteller throughout his recitatives and arias, and by playing it dead straight on “Cheerful, roaring stands the tawny lion” he had the audience in his pocket.

The evening’s disappointment, such as it was, concerned the quincentennial choir itself. The choral sound had a fresh-toned sparkle, classical without a hint of the oratorio school of chorusing; but the singers’ placement at the very rear of the platform, beyond even the farthest pair of those fine Corinthian columns, prevented their voices from cutting through the orchestral forces, modest though these were. Nethsingha, clearly conscious of the imbalance, had attempted to rectify matters by adding four female supernumeraries to his vocal mix; but this only served to muddy the boys’ exceptional treble character. As “The Creation” is not a particularly chorus-heavy work (making it a questionable choice of repertoire to mark such an important anniversary), when the great choruses do occur they need to resound with bell-like clarity. The heavens should have been refulgent in telling the glory of God; but, in St John’s, although the spirit was manifestly willing, the flesh was that little bit too weak.