Reviews
Orpheus singers carry piece meant for bigger chorus
SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
Francis Poulenc's Gloria accompanied by organ? How would that sound?
That alone must have drawn some curious listeners to the Orpheus Chamber Singers' concert Sunday evening at Highland Park Presbyterian Church. Not that Donald Krehbiel's superb 24-voice professional chamber choir lacks a sizable and devoted following.
Bradley Hunter Welch did a virtuoso job of transcribing Poulenc's bright-colored orchestration to the organ. The underscaled, spitty reeds of the church's 1983 Casavant instrument were poor substitutes for orchestral brasses, but elsewhere Dr. Welch spun quite a kaleidoscope of piquant sonorities. If he hit a wrong note, aside from Poulenc's deliberate ones, I didn't hear it.
The piece was also meant for a much larger symphonic choir, and occasionally (as in the tenors' clarion "Qui sedes") one did long for more heft. But you'll hear no big chorus phrase so elegantly – or, probably, tune so accurately – as Mr. Krehbiel's charges.
Tiffany Roberts was a little too well-behaved a soprano soloist, lacking the blaze one wants for those big "Amen"s. But she sang quite musically and floated some lovely high pianissimos.
She was less persuasive in three of Debussy's Ariettes oubliées, for solo voice and piano. Neither she nor pianist Brian D. Bentley got beyond expressive generalities, and her French wasn't quite, as they say, comme il faut.
Poulenc's harmonies are notoriously hard to tune, but there were even trickier ones elsewhere in Orpheus' all-French program. Georges Auric, along with Poulenc one of the smarty-pants composers dubbed Les Six, set some really daunting challenges in two of his Cinq chansons françaises. And the Orpheus singers didn't quite home in on all of them.
But both here and in the lush harmonies of Saint-Saëns' Deux chansons the French diction was impressively clear and true. Rounding out the secular choral section of the program were 14th- and 15th-century madrigals by Josquin des Prez, Pierre Certon and Pierre Passereau.
Maurice Duruflé's exquisite Four Motets on Gregorian Themes were exquisitely sung, although in "Ubi caritas" the alto melody wanted a smoother legato and the delicious closing chords more time for savoring. There were also two tantalizing selections from Daniel-Lesur's Song of Songs. "Dialogue," with complex harmonies straining against a drone, was particularly striking.
Inexcusably, the audience was left in darkness too deep for reading the texts and translations in the program.