• Blog
  • Clients
  • About Me

Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Kidderminster

Review: Kidderminster Choral Society

29 Friday Apr 2016

Posted by richardbratby in Uncategorized

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Birmingham Post, Haydn, Kidderminster, Reviews

The Birmingham Post isn’t always able to post online everything that I’ve written for its print edition, so – after a suitable time lag (you should really go out and buy the paper!) – I’ll be posting my recent reviews here. As per the print edition, they’re all fairly concise – just 250 words. This is of a performance at Kidderminster Town Hall on Saturday 19  March.


Handel’s The King Shall Rejoice, Haydn’s Nelson Mass and Mozart’s anything-but-solemn Solemn Vespers – the Kidderminster Choral Society clearly likes to keep itself busy. This was a concert of pretty much wall-to-wall choral singing, and none the worse for it: three top-flight masterpieces delivered with energy and zing under the Society’s artistic director Geoffrey Weaver.

And that was despite the stage arrangements at Kidderminster’s Victorian Town Hall – which split the choir in two and stacked them steeply on either side of the organ. The KCS is clearly well-used to this: they produced a big, bright mass of sound, with a brilliant soprano section and a more than usually lively team of altos. In the Haydn, they sounded like they were enjoying every note. Weaver kept it bowling along and the choir responded with lively, natural phasing and crisp, clearly enunciated interjections in the Gloria.

Perhaps he might have paced the Benedictus to make more a climax out of the arrival of Haydn’s warlike trumpets – but there was no doubt that the spirit of the thing was there in spades. It helped that they had such a winningly youthful line-up of soloists: contralto Elisabeth Paul, tenor Christopher Fitzgerald-Lombard and bass Andrew Randall. But the real heroine of the evening was the soprano Gemma King, standing in at one day’s notice, and singing with a pure, vibrato-light tone and such smiling freshness that you’d never have known it.

A couple of caveats: there’d be room in the nicely-produced programme book for the text and translations – these should be provided as a matter of course. And as Richard Strauss once said: don’t look at the trombones, it only encourages them. Throughout the first half, one of the Elgar Sinfonia’s trombonists (unnamed in the programme) honked it out so noisily that any chance of distinguishing the chorus’s words was obliterated, at least from where I was sitting. 

Contact Details

38 Beacon Street
Lichfield
United Kingdom
Staffordshire
WS13 7AJ

07754 068427

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Archives

  • June 2020 (1)
  • October 2019 (2)
  • January 2018 (1)
  • December 2017 (2)
  • November 2017 (2)
  • October 2017 (1)
  • August 2017 (2)
  • July 2017 (1)
  • June 2017 (3)
  • April 2017 (2)
  • March 2017 (2)
  • February 2017 (2)
  • December 2016 (1)
  • September 2016 (3)
  • August 2016 (1)
  • July 2016 (1)
  • June 2016 (2)
  • May 2016 (1)
  • April 2016 (3)
  • March 2016 (6)
  • February 2016 (1)
  • January 2016 (3)
  • December 2015 (6)
  • November 2015 (4)
  • October 2015 (6)
  • September 2015 (5)
  • August 2015 (5)
  • July 2015 (8)
  • June 2015 (12)
  • May 2015 (12)
  • April 2015 (1)
  • February 2015 (1)
  • January 2015 (2)
  • December 2014 (4)
  • November 2014 (3)

Archives

Create a free website or blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy