On Saturday I performed in a concert of music associated with Spain and Latin America in St. Mary Redcliffe church with the Exultate Singers.
This considerably expanded the list of languages I’ve now performed in, with the addition of Quechua, Nahuatl and Portuguese, together with a piece in a creolised form of Spanish (sung to a proto-rumba rhythm).
Along with early choral music from the days of the missions (hence the Quechua and Nahuatl) and some Spanish Renaissance polychoral motets, there were two substantial 20th-century pieces on the programme. I hadn’t come across Ginastera’s Lamentations of Jeremiah before. In this wartime setting words to do with death get great emphasis and the first of the three sections makes a much more aggressive approach to the text of ‘O vos omnes’ than settings of it usually do; nevertheless the work brightens up a bit towards the end. One thing I missed: the Hebrew letters which preface the sections in settings such as Tallis’.
This was also the first (and rather belated) time I’d performed anything by James MacMillan, in this case his Canticos Sagrados (I missed a chance to do them with the Bath Festival Chorus a few years ago). This used the mighty Redcliffe organ to good effect and seemed to make a great impression on choir and audience alike. I’m not sure in my case whether this wasn’t at least as much due to the words (translated from Latin American poets) as the music. As with anyone else, it’s a case of ‘know your composer’ and it took a little while for me to get used to MacMillan’s quirks, such as the use of very long and very short notes simultaneously and his liking for note clusters (being a second soprano I was right in the middle of some of these). I feel I understand and appreciate his music rather better now for having performed some of it, but I’m still left with the reaction I always have to MacMillan – that I ought to like his music more than I actually do.