The Scottish Chamber Choir comes to Kelso to celebrate the beginning of summer with a host of golden choral pieces. From dawn in Sheena Phillips’ celebratory Aurora rutilat to Eric Whitacre’s caressing Sleep, the programme radiates joy in the unfolding beauty and ease of the long days and soft nights of summer.
Gerald Finzi’s 1939 setting of Seven Poems of Robert Bridges weaves gossamer vocal lines into intricate harmonies catching at the fleeting beauty of a flower, a phrase of music, a lost love. These are exquisite miniatures with a purity of emotion that finds sadness and solace in the passing moment, the “swift unceasing flight” of joy.
Andrew Carvel’s Summer Sun sets the poem from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses and was commissioned for the choir’s 50th anniversary in 2018. The composer’s musical direction for the performers is “calm and shimmering” and this is a sweet and lithe evocation of the golden power of the sun, “to please the child, to paint the rose, the gardener of the world he goes”.
At the heart of this bouquet of beautiful miniatures is Palestrina’s Missa brevis. Amongst his many settings of the mass, this is one of the composer’s shortest and sweetest. Graceful lines and spacious polyphony will fill Kelso Old Parish Church with sumptuous sounds.
The contrast could hardly be greater between Palestrina and the exuberantly crazy mood of Finnish composer Jaakko Mantyjarvi’s Pseudo-Yoik. It’s impossible to describe, so come and hear it!
