Review: Portsmouth Festival Choir at the Church of the Holy Spirit, Southsea
But listeners faced a dilemma: sit at the front for clarity in the readings, or at the back for superior musical balance.
As this was the choir’s gig, I stayed back and in the ripe acoustic missed much of the undoubted merit in the speaking of Bench Theatre leading lights David Penrose and Sally Hartley.
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Hide AdEven so, they made their own potent ‘music’ in the lines of Lorenzo and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, ‘In such a night.’
The same play gave rise to Serenade To Music, Vaughan Williams’s setting of ‘How sweet the moonlight’. Here conductor Peter Allwood set soloists from the choir a challenge they met with mixed success.
The singers were most consistently effective in the bluesy elements of George Shearing’s suite, Music To Hear; in plumbing the depths of Alexander L’Estrange’s ’Full fathom five’; and in the lively syncopations of John Rutter’s ‘It was a lover and his lass’.