Review: Voices of Aotearoa

ON SONG: Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir.

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For its final concert of the 2011 season, Chamber Music New Zealand moved away from the instruments of the chamber music world, and presented a concert by the splendid Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir, fresh from a triumphant visit to the World Symposium of Choral Music in Argentina. And here the choir sang a programme closely aligned to those it presented there  a concert divided into four parts.

With the supremely atmospheric partnership with Maori instrument performer Horomona Horo, at the forefront it visited a world of mostly contemporary choral music - only the brief O viridissimi Virga from the 12th century nun Hildegard of Bingen broke the pattern - and did so with singing of supreme polish and breathtaking accuracy.

Still, at the end I wondered if the mood, and gently decorous dissonances of much modern choral music is just a bit limiting.

I kept wanting the music to break out from its rather formal restrictions. Even the Five Flower Songs by Benjamin Britten, who could really write for the voice, suffered in this respect.

Of course, there was some absolutely lovely stuff here, nothing more so than the six Fire Songs by Morten Lauridsen; restrained, but beautifully crafted, and culminating in the sixth Se Per Havervi, Oime  which was a thing of stunning beauty.

Music: Voices of Aotearoa

Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir directed by Karen Grylls with Horomona Horo (taonga puoro), Wellington Town Hall, November 19

Reviewed by John Button

- © Fairfax NZ News

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