Reviews
December 2013 - Andrea Hopkins, Daily Information
‘This was just the thing to put you in the mood for Christmas - if you had been feeling a bit Bah-Humbug-ish thanks to the annual spend-fest and the vile weather - a perfectly formed short concert of seasonally themed choral works, mostly sung by the wonderful Jubilate! Choir. Keble College Chapel, vast and cold and with its glorious technicolour mosaics and murals muted in the candlelight, looked rather delicious, lit by hundreds of tea-lights, flickering and wavering in the winter gloom.
The concert alternated glorious choral pieces with organ recitals on Keble’s gorgeously mellow new organ. The choir started as they meant to go on, before the altar, with Benjamin Britten’s beautiful and subtle 'Hymn to the Virgin' (written when he was a mere whippersnapper of 16!), at once plunging the audience into the miraculous experience of being in a perfect sound box for the human voice. I can’t stress again how wonderful, how sensuous, this experience is – if there’s a better acoustic in Oxford I haven’t encountered it – in a chapel that was crammed full of humans all swathed and swaddled in sound-dampening padded clothing. We were enfolded and penetrated by exquisite harmonies building from subtle precision to awesome, full-throated climax, which filled the vast spaces of the roof and continued to roll through the air for a full two or three second after the singers had shut their mouths. Awesome.
Apart from two early works by Orlando Gibbons and one by Eustache de Caurroy, the programme was resolutely modern, finishing with two traditional carols ('See Amid the Winter Snow' and 'Silent Night') that had been polished up with new arrangements by Simon Whalley and David Willcocks. The singing was as miraculously precise as always - we have high expectations of this outstanding choir, and they did not disappoint us. It was, as ever, fascinating to watch Simon Whalley conducting rather as if he were cooking, appearing to fold the voices into the air with his hands. Enriched by the awesome voice of counter-tenor Hugh Cutting in 'This is the Record of John' and the superb 'Susanni', the sound is so divine that the choir barely sound human; they create an angelic resonance that literally makes your hair stand on end. To bring us back down to earth this was intercut with organ music; 'Variations sur un Noël' by Marcel Dupré. Peronsally I could live without this, but I guess the choir have to rest their voices for a bit.
There was no interval so the whole concert seemed brief and we barely had time to feel hungry before we were out in the damp foggy air, dazed by an hour and and a half of intricate beauty rolling around the vault of your skull in memory as it just had the vault of the chapel roof. Definitely worth leaving your cosy fireside for.’
The concert alternated glorious choral pieces with organ recitals on Keble’s gorgeously mellow new organ. The choir started as they meant to go on, before the altar, with Benjamin Britten’s beautiful and subtle 'Hymn to the Virgin' (written when he was a mere whippersnapper of 16!), at once plunging the audience into the miraculous experience of being in a perfect sound box for the human voice. I can’t stress again how wonderful, how sensuous, this experience is – if there’s a better acoustic in Oxford I haven’t encountered it – in a chapel that was crammed full of humans all swathed and swaddled in sound-dampening padded clothing. We were enfolded and penetrated by exquisite harmonies building from subtle precision to awesome, full-throated climax, which filled the vast spaces of the roof and continued to roll through the air for a full two or three second after the singers had shut their mouths. Awesome.
Apart from two early works by Orlando Gibbons and one by Eustache de Caurroy, the programme was resolutely modern, finishing with two traditional carols ('See Amid the Winter Snow' and 'Silent Night') that had been polished up with new arrangements by Simon Whalley and David Willcocks. The singing was as miraculously precise as always - we have high expectations of this outstanding choir, and they did not disappoint us. It was, as ever, fascinating to watch Simon Whalley conducting rather as if he were cooking, appearing to fold the voices into the air with his hands. Enriched by the awesome voice of counter-tenor Hugh Cutting in 'This is the Record of John' and the superb 'Susanni', the sound is so divine that the choir barely sound human; they create an angelic resonance that literally makes your hair stand on end. To bring us back down to earth this was intercut with organ music; 'Variations sur un Noël' by Marcel Dupré. Peronsally I could live without this, but I guess the choir have to rest their voices for a bit.
There was no interval so the whole concert seemed brief and we barely had time to feel hungry before we were out in the damp foggy air, dazed by an hour and and a half of intricate beauty rolling around the vault of your skull in memory as it just had the vault of the chapel roof. Definitely worth leaving your cosy fireside for.’
