MUSIC AND DANCE REVIEWS : BRITISH BOYS CHOIR IN LOCAL DEBUT
What with the pomp and circumstance, processionals, politicians’ proclamations and pundits giving history lessons, you’d have thought that the Choir of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, making its first Los Angeles concert appearance Friday at the First Congregational Church, was the second musical coming.
It wasn’t. It was a good, solid, respectable choir that, under the direction of Christopher Robinson, sang with reasonable purity and focus but without raising the pulse or engaging the heart.
Even on such first-rate native musical territory as in works by the 16th-Century composer John Taverner, (“Dum transisset Sabbatum”), for instance, or by Elgar (Psalm 48), the 28-voice ensemble failed to provide definitive readings:
One wanted warmer, more hovering and lingering counterpoint in Taverner or greater power than the 16 boys could add in Elgar.
Similarly, Poulenc’s a cappella Mass in G received appreciative but not deeply insightful attention.
Choir organist Neil Kelley provided occasionally overwhelming accompaniment and on his own offered tempestuous but amorphous accounts of Mendelssohn’s Sonata No. 3 and Liszt’s “Fantasia and Fugue on B.A.C.H.”
The capacity audience gave the choir a standing ovation, and the choir sang “Summertime” and “Love Walked Right In” as encores.
The biggest entertainment stories
Get our big stories about Hollywood, film, television, music, arts, culture and more right in your inbox as soon as they publish.
You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.
