Music brings light in darkest hour

Indra Hughes

How many of us were crestfallen last year when a concert featuring Helen Medlyn in the Rachmaninov Vespers toppled over with the cancellation of Musica Sacra's 2005 programme?

Despair not - the Auckland chamber choir is up and singing again.

Conductor Indra Hughes is quick to say it will be a new and improved Musica Sacra which, on Friday, will lighten one of the most sombre days of the year with the music of Faure and Bach.

"The choir had reached a point where things were ticking over," says Hughes. "If we had done nothing we would have been treading water, and I wanted to keep going up."

Three years ago, Hughes spoke of stained glass windows, incense and bells creating the ideal ambience for Musica Sacra; now he is talking restructuring.

"The choir will be converted into a trust and governed by external trustees rather than by itself, which didn't make any sense at all. It is all designed to take us up to the next level and keep it fresh."

Staying fresh is not the only problem in Auckland's choral scene - survival is the first worry. Hughes says there are simply too many choirs fighting for the same audience and dates.

The individuality of Musica Sacra has always been guaranteed by its focus on sacred music.

"It might seem like a narrow corner of the repertoire," Hughes muses, "but we believe this is the best music of all and we don't try to be all things to all people."

The choir now finds itself in a new home, St Matthew-in-the-City. The church is a familiar concert venue and one that is "visually and architecturally appropriate for this sort of music and acoustically very helpful".

In Friday night's programme, Faure is represented by his popular Requiem. It was performed only last year by the Auckland Philharmonia, but Hughes' trump card is that he is doing the original edition.

It is all in the orchestration. "There is just one solo violin playing in two movements, with five violas, four cellos and a double bass. All of which gives it an incredibly rich, bottom-heavy sound."

"Burnished" is another adjective added, when Hughes reveals that Faure also calls for two horns, harp and organ. "With this special chamber orchestra accompaniment you hear the lines in quite a different way."

Alongside the French composer's work is Bach's cantata, Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen. Hughes enjoys rolling the German over his tongue before he translates it as Weeping, Wailing, Sorrowing, Fearing.

The Good Friday connection here is that the cantata's opening chorus was recycled by Bach as the Crucifixus in his later Mass in B minor, but Hughes is more intent on tempting with the work's "gorgeous Sinfonia that starts like the slow movement of an oboe concerto, with this expressive oboe line floating over the strings".

This man knows his Bach. Hughes is completing a doctorate around the composer's final opus, The Art of Fugue. His argument is that Bach did not leave the work unfinished because of his death, but rather as a challenge to those who followed.

"I feel that Bach wanted the student to go away and work out just how to finish it. And perhaps there are hidden clues in what was already written to point us in the right direction."

Recent studies in Berlin have assured this Bachian sleuth that he was on the right trail. Come Friday night, Auckland will be assured that it has not lost one of its choral treasures.


Performance

* What: Musica Sacra
* Where and when: St Matthew-in-the-City, Friday 8pm