The Holy City, Three Choirs Festival, Gloucester Cathedral, Saturday 22 July, 2023.

5*****: David Gray & Paul Gray

Eleanor Alberga – Rise up, Oh Sun

Ralph Vaughan Williams – Sancta Civitas

Edward Elgar – Violin Concerto

It felt appropriate that the opening evening concert of this year’s Three Choirs Festival should start with a newly commissioned work. This ancient institution renews and refreshes itself every year in an amazing cycle of rebirth. Remaining fresh and relevant, year on year, because it welcomes the new.

Eleanor Alberga’s Rise up, Oh Sun, based on a text by Blake and set for large choir and full orchestra, is a rich and imaginatively scored work, full of colour, contrast and energy, as befits a composition that seeks to embody the essence of the well-spring of life. Alberga draws upon Blake’s poetry selectively, using only part of it and reordering it to suit her compositional purposes. The text is a source of ideas and sounds, rather than a cohesive whole.

Perhaps because of this, diction was muddy, and the words got rather lost. This was a shame as we lost sense of the underlying inspiration behind what was, otherwise, a powerful performance of an uplifting work.

Diction was much clearer in the second work of the evening, Vaughan-William’s Sancta Civitas. In this piece the composer responds to a text that is by turns completive, and dynamically dramatic with music of subtle lyricism and massy power. The choir delivered the more dramatic moments with monolithic force and the more thoughtful moments with delicacy and nuance. This year’s choir is a fine one indeed.

It is an intriguing work that builds to an almost ecstatic climax but ends on a dying fall, the final choral passage drifting away into the ether. Conductor and festival director, Adrian Partington shaped the whole thing with an eye for drama and an ear for form.

Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay delivered a sensitive, powerful and virtuosic reading of the Elgar Violin Concerto. His rich but steely tone soared out into the Cathedral’s yielding acoustic. The Philharmonia Orchestra played with tight ensemble in a score where musical ideas flow fluidly from one instrument to another in an organic manner. Partington perfectly captured and controlled the surging, yearning feel of the piece as a whole, but also created moments of delicate almost hesitant tenderness.

An impressive start to this year’s festival which promises much for the week to come.

Cast

Roderick Williams – Baritone

Ruairi Bowen – Tenor

Zsolt-Tihamer Visontay – Violin

Three Choirs Festival Chorus

Gloucester Cathedral Choirs

Philharmonia Orchestra

Adrian Partington - Conductor