A couple of years ago Tenebrae’s Bath début was thwarted by a storm which made it unsafe to travel. They returned for this year’s Bath Bachfest, to give a concert in St Mary’s Bathwick. I bought the last ticket in the nave for what appeared to be a sell-out, with a musically knowledgeable audience around me.
The first half was one of Gesualdo’s settings of the eponymous Tenebrae service, the one for Holy Saturday. All of this was unfamiliar to me and I did my best to navigate the unfamiliar chord progressions and modulations. Sometimes I felt the composer was trying out the same ones repeatedly to experiment and find out which one worked best. The setting of O vos omnes for example, has much in common in this respect with the more famous setting which I know.
After the interval came Bach motets. After Komm, Jesu, komm came Jesu, meine Freude which was perhaps the weak link in these performances. The same ten singers sang throughout the evening, but with a five-part choir the two soprano lines didn’t quite match the volume of the lower voices. But the high point was the sparkling Singet dem Herrn which ended the concert. Here the rather rigid approach to tempi favoured by Nigel Short kept the motet motoring along briskly.
I was glad to have made it to this concert but I’m not a totally unqualified fan of Tenebrae. Despite their immaculate tuning and blend, I find there is something a little relentless and hard-edged about their performances. Difficult to put my finger on the source of this – maybe it is the inflexibility of tempi (apart from at the ends of phrases) or a sense that the blend is achieved because some of the singers are having to suppress natural warmth in their voices?
The coach was once again disgorging its passengers outside the church for this concert, and I’ve now found out where they come from. Maybe this is something other festivals, not least the Bath International Festival, could learn from; get on the radar of an organisation which organises cultural tours.