Amongst a limited Adelaide Festival classical program, a small local component still manages to shine.

St Peter’s Cathedral, Adelaide

March 5, 2014

Whilst the music section of Adelaide Festivals curated by David Sefton has been cut considerably – gone are the opera and orchestral concerts – an emphasis on string quartets and Adelaide’s own acclaimed Chamber Singers thankfully continues. The late night offerings in St Peter’s Cathedral by the chamber choir, remain musical highlights with two concerts covering the complete motets by JS Bach.

With minimum fuss and almost minuscule conducting from Carl Crossin, it became immediately apparent that this internationally award winning chamber choir had these concentrated and often difficult works completely within their control and ken with the right balance of contrapuntal weight and tautness nearly always apparent throughout.

Given the complexity and drama, not to mention the sheer mastery of Bach’s writing, Crossin was indeed correct in programming them over two concerts, whilst adding excerpts from perhaps the greatest of Bach’s solo masterpieces for solo violin – the (in)famous virtuosic Chaconne as well as the Sarabande and Gigue from the Second Partita – impeccably played by baroque specialist Lucinda Moon. And of course it almost goes without saying just how appropriate were the cathedral’s acoustics in this composer whom I regard as the most spiritual of all composers, period.

The inclusion of the two a capella choral works by the 95-year-old Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt (Immortal Bach I & II) provided the perfect foil to Johann Sebastian’s concentrated counterpoint. Given that Nystedt had studied with the great American modernist cum pastoralist Aaron Copland, it was indeed appropriate that the space between the notes was just as important as the music itself. Here was music that was almost viscerally affecting as well being hypnotic with the untangling of the lines providing a great sense of emotional release as well as leaving the audience with a sense of being spiritually uplifted.

All of this was music that demanded concentration and yet paid great dividends for its audiences. For Bach’s six motets, which formed the heart and soul of these two concerts, whilst often praised for their virtuosity and invention by critics, are heard less often than the Passions and cantatas. And yet with performances of this calibre, it is soon realised that these choral works can stand as true equals to any of the well-loved chorales from the St Matthew Passion, indeed with any of Bach’s choral masterpieces.