A mix of rarities with more familiar music

Sacred music
Miriam Cauchi, soprano; Noel Galea, bass
MPO, director Emmanuel Spagnol
St John’s Co-Cathedral

The incomparable splendour of St John’s was the setting for this concert of sacred music, one which inevitably attracted a full church. The programme selected by Emmanuel Spagnol was a mix of familiar works with some rarities the latter of which included music by the prolific contemporary composer Karl Jenkins. The vocal element was also well-balanced with the purely orchestral numbers.

Speaking of the former, soprano Miriam Cauchi was on the best of form, hers being the first vocal contribution to the concert when she sang the Ave Maria from Verdi’s Otello. This was a heartfelt interpretation, the voice crystal clear and soaring easily and without effort underlined by the delicate playing of the strings. This created the rightly fervid and intensely devotional aspects of the prayer. In another Ave Maria, the much earlier one by Caccini (arr. Christopher Muscat), she maintained the same feeling although the context is a different one to the Verdi. Just beautiful, bless her! The singer was equally well-equipped technically and musically, for the Jenkins Gloria – I’ll make music which was proof of the ease the singer changes idiom and produces equally convincing results.

Bass Noel Galea has a lovely voice with faultless middle and lower registers. He is not all that comfortable in the highest reaches as could be felt and heard in climactic parts of the Pro Peccatis from Rossini’s Stabat Mater. Yet who could doubt the superb mellowness in most of this piece, one which just carried one along with it? In the invocation Lord, God of Abraham from Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the voice was much better pitched in the high reaches and projected authority, faith and conviction. The bass’ last solo was the Ingemisco from Anton Nani’s splendid Requiem, beautiful and unashamedly Romantic/Verdian.

This sailed on rather smoothly although it seemed that the phrasing of the conclusion sounded a bit less convincing.

As referred to in the programme notes, none but Sibelius could have written the funeral march In Memoriam, Opus 59, with which the concert had begun. There was no mistaking that highly individual texture in the strings, the brooding brass and the chattering woodwind. Maybe at times in the ff sections the brass section was an iota that much louder… or it could be the acoustics. Anyway, the other funeral march of the evening, Siegfried’s from Wagner’s Götterdämerung was a well-controlled affair with those sweeping build-ups to majestic climaxes and splendid orchestration wherein so much of Wagner’s bewitching musical allure lies. On the other hand, Fauré has his own gentle way of in exercising a different sort of magic, such as the serenity and dignity so well evoked in the interpretation of his Pavane, Opus 50. The same ingredients prevailed in the famous Albinoni Adagio, with some lovely solo passages by orchestra leader Marcelline Agius.

Karl Jenkin’s Ave Verum, the evening’s only vocal duet with orchestra, which was just lovely, brought the concert to a fitting end.