I approached Love, Loss & Laughter, the collaboration between Auckland Choral and the Manukau City Symphony Orchestra, with trepidation.
Before I could enjoy the love and laughter of Elgar and David Hamilton there was loss to be worked through in the form of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Requiem.
The
passage of 25 years has not been kind to this score. Even when musical values were at their strongest, with John Murray bursting into Ingemisco, one sat aghast at the aimless plod of Lloyd Webber's lines, second only to those in Evita, which - the Argentina ballad excepted - is a melody-free zone. To the tenor's considerable credit, the music almost sprang off its arid page.
Alas, when the men of the choir were presented with a similar challenge, they tackled the Herculean task far too gingerly.
Soprano Morag McDowell and treble Frazer MacDiarmid were a harmonious duo in Pie Jesu, but how did this dull ditty ever take the public fancy?
Faure's setting of the same text leaves it, one might say, for dead.
While mix'n'mingle is now all the rage, Lloyd Webber never puts a foot right from the moment a drum-kit slashes into the Dies Irae or the Offertorium sweeps us into waltz-time.
"There is much less angst in the second half of the programme," was conductor Peter Watts' introduction to the Victorian nosegay of Elgar's Songs from the Bavarian Highlands.
There was a new confidence here from singers and the full orchestra, opening with a jolly beer-garden waltz that was only a few beats away from Gilbert and Sullivan and ending with a stirring nobilmente. Singing was particularly confident in False Love.
David Hamilton's The Dragons are Singing Tonight worked its spell on both musicians and audience.
Hamilton's settings of Jack Prelutsky's Seuss-ish poems has charm. If a rough orchestra conspired against the suspense of waiting for the dragon's egg to hatch, the players injected high spirits into The Mechanical Dragon.
A bored dragon was delightfully sketched in wandering time signatures and the Manukau musicians relished the breezy backing to a tale of a dozen dragons in a closet.
Review
* What: Auckland Choral
* Where: Genesis Energy Theatre
* Reviewer: William Dart
