REVIEW

Richard Morrison

Trafalgar Square’s parish church, St-Martin-in-the-Fields, was full of Kiwi accents, on and off stage, for this memorable meeting of the excellent Voices New Zealand Chamber Choir and our own BBC Singers. It was a wonderful if occasionally overwhelming sound — 40 professional voices, beautifully tuned under the joint leadership of Karen Grylls and Sofi Jeannin. And they delivered a fascinating amalgam not just of old and new music, but also of northern and southern hemispheres.

That was evident even in the title of the main work: Erebus: Reimagining Mozart, by the Auckland-based composer Robert Wiremu. Erebus is a mountain in the Antarctic. It’s also where an Air New Zealand plane on a sightseeing flight crashed in 1979, killing 257 people.

Wiremu’s 2023 piece commemorates that by taking Mozart’s Requiem (which he imagines being played on a Sony Walkman belonging to a passenger) and recomposing it using a double string orchestra (here, fine players from Aurora), a haunting solo vibraphone (beautifully played by Catherine Ring) and much surreal deconstruction.

It could have been tasteless, and there were moments in the third movement called Hinga (Descent), where Wiremu turns the Recordare movement into an instrumental depiction of the plane going down, when I began to think it was. But the piece was delivered with such care and sincerity that criticism seems churlish. Indeed it came across more as a healing ritual than a performance, starting with a Maori incantation and ending tenderly with Mozart’s final choral work, Ave Verum Corpus.

Earlier we heard two other reworkings of ancient classics. A flowing if under-nuanced performance of Bach’s double choir motet Komm, Jesu, komm was followed by the New Zealand composer Leonie Holmes’s modern variant, setting chunks of Bach against clusters and piano swirls. Later, Praetorius’s seasonal Es ist ein Ros entsprungen also got the cluster-treatment in Jan Sandstrom’s ethereal two-choir adaptation.

However, it was highly imaginative pieces by young Antipodean composers — Joseph Twist, Reuben Rameka and Takerei Komene (who also sang bass in the New Zealand choir) — that really tickled the ear. All deployed tonal and atmospheric effects deftly, as well as antiphonal interplay and natural sounds such as birdsong and whistling, to evoke spiritual or ecological texts. Here was music, one felt, that conveyed real insight into the soul of a distant country that shares so much with us yet is so different. Oddly, the BBC isn’t broadcasting the concert.
★★★★☆