United Kingdom Christmas music from Schütz, Praetorius, MacMillan and other composers: Kana Kawashima (violin), Scottish Chamber Orchestra Chorus / Gregory Batsleer (conductor). Greyfriars Kirk, Edinburgh, 18.12.2024. (SRT)
Trad (arr. Vaughan Williams) – The Truth from Above
Schütz – Deutsches Magnificat
Matteis Jnr – Fantasia in A minor (violin solo)
H. Praetorius – Joseph lieber, Joseph mein; Magnificat on the Fifth Tone; In dulci jubilo
Bach – Largo from Sonata No.3 in C; Andante from Sonata No.2 in A minor (violin solos)
Joubert – There is no Rose
Judith Weir – Drop down, ye heavens
Howells – A Spotless Rose*
Matteis Snr – Preludio – passagio rotto (from Ayres for the Violin
ccard – When to the Temple Mary went
Gruber (arr Lucy Walker) – Silent Night**
James Macmillan – Ave Maris Stella
Tavener – Hymn to the Mother of God
M. Praetorius (arr. Jan Sandström) – Es ist ein Ros entsprungen
While the Princes Street Christmas markets ply their noisy (and increasingly expensive) trade only a few minutes’ walk away, another indispensable part of Edinburgh’s Christmas celebrations plays out its altogether quieter, more introverted path at Greyfriars Kirk on the edge of Edinburgh’s Old Town. Under the directorship of Gregory Batsleer, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Chorus has had their own concert every Christmas for more than a decade now. It is the only concert in the SCO’s season that is guaranteed to sell out every year (I often wonder what the orchestral musicians think of that!) and demand has been so high that they have had to put on two concerts for the last few years. It is a beautiful oasis of musical spirituality at the most frenetic time of year, and they have hit upon a pattern that works because it gives them space to refresh it.
It is almost all unaccompanied singing, for one thing, and while this might cause terrors for other amateur choirs, their pitching and focus is generally good enough to hold it throughout. Their opening procession up the aisle to Vaughan Williams’s Truth from Above, was beautifully focused in that regard, and they maintained impressive focus through all the longer items in the programme, notably Hieronymus Praetorius’s Magnificat. Only towards the end of the programme did some of the tuning slide, such as in Lucy Walker’s arrangement of Silent Night, and it was particularly unfortunate in their final number, Jan Sandström’s densely clustered version of Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, which was sung with the choir spread throughout the nave of the church (where the rest had all been sung from a stage at the front). Normally Sandström’s arrangement sounds so visionary because the choir that sings it is so focused: by this time in the concert, however, the choir had lost some of their tightness, and being spread out so widely meant that several of the entries and harmonies had begun to droop.
That, however, was the only complaint in a programme that was otherwise well sung and well organised. Two works of the pre-Bach German Lutheran tradition anchored the first part, with Schütz’s German Magnificat bouncing along with a buoyant sense of delight, and Praetorius’s Magnificat melding three hymn settings together in a way that would have been crude it if wasn’t so enchanting, the lovely ring of the ladies’ voices underpinned by confident bass sound, and helped by a flawlessly focused tenor solo for the plainchant moments. The two most modern things in the second part were very effective, too. The luminous textures of James MacMillan’s Ave Maris Stella were spellbinding, the unchanging soprano line acting as an anchor below which the other voices gently moved in gorgeous step, and Lucy Walker’s new arrangement of Silent Night used warmly predictable harmonies before a rather lovely key change for the final verse.
The other constant in the chorus’s Christmas concert is an ‘other’, a guest who isn’t singing; and this year it was Kana Kawashima, one of the SCO’s first violins. She played four solo pieces, none of which were particularly Christmassy, but all of which benefited from gorgeous clarity of tone and vibrato-less transparency that meant you could hear everything as though it had been freshly cleaned. Her pieces by Matteis Junior and Senior were played with beguiling simplicity and purity that carried a compelling communicative directness, and the two Bach movements seemed to shimmer in midair as they gently rocked the listener closer to spiritual bliss. You are not going to get that on Princes Street.
Simon Thompson