The Kansas City Chorale and the Phoenix Bach Choir are professional
choruses directed by Charles Bruffy.  Today they gave a joint concert, a
first for them, and it was stunning.  Each choir consists of 24 singers
(SATB:  6 singers each), so this was a choir of 48.  The concert consisted
of English music and was entirely unaccompanied.  (OK, OK, Stanford was
Irish, but who's noticing.)

The concert location was the Redemptorist Cathedral in Kansas City, newly
and beautifully refurbished.  It has an extremely long decay time and hence
the most effective pieces had fairly slow harmonic motion.  Actually there
were only two pieces on the program that were at all fast:  the Gibbons
(which turned into a reverberating mishmash) and, less so, the second of
the Stanford motets, 'Coelo ascendit.'

They started with probably the most spectacular singing (and work) of the
day:  Thomas Tallis's 'Spem in alium', which is a piece for eight separate
groups of five singers, 40 distinct parts.  The choirs were ranged in
groups of 5 around the hall and conducted by Bruffy who stood in the middle
of the center aisle.  When they sang the Tallis sound swept from one side
to the other, from front to back, as the various groups entered and left
the polyphonic mix.  It was like sitting in the middle of an aural sea with
waves crashing first this way and then that.  Absolutely ear-boggling.  And
hair-raisingly beautiful.  It must be incredibly difficult to keep together
but to my ears they did a splendid job of it.

I had known this piece from recordings but had never heard it live.  The
antiphonal effect made all the difference, of course, and I don't think I
could go back to plain stereo recording; it would be too one-dimensional.

Another highlight was Elgar's 'There is sweet music', to words by Tennyson
(from 'The Lotus Eaters').  The piece is very unusual in that the men's and
women's parts are written in two different keys.  The bitonality is handled
so skillfully that there is really no harshness, but rather dreamy shifts
in color.

The rest of the program:

O Clap Your Hands  ............. Orlando Gibbons
Mass in G Minor  ............... Ralph Vaughan Williams
Faire is the Heaven  ........... William Henry Harris*
Three Motets, Op. 38 ........... Charles Villiers Stanford
Lord, Let Me Know Mine End  .... Hubert Parry

Encore: The Blue Bird .......... Stanford

The response of the audience was loudly enthusiastic; we didn't want to let
them go.  And afterwards Bruffy told me that the success of this concert
led him to believe that these joint concerts should become an annual event.

Absolutely!

*I'd not encountered his name before. Harris was master of music at St.
George's Chapel, Windsor, and was Queen Elizabeth's and Princess Margaret's
piano teacher.

Scott Morrison