EIF Music reviews: The Veil of the Temple | Colin Currie & The King’s Singers

The Veil of the Temple

Usher Hall

★★★★☆

How to open a festival? In recent decades, Edinburgh International Festival has presented a raft of ideas: mighty Schoenberg to alarm the great and the good, huge orchestras and choruses, impressive ensembles in stadiums and dazzling light shows around historic monuments. We may miss some, regret others, but for sure Sir John Tavener’s extraordinary spiritual marathon The Veil of the Temple could not feature anywhere but at a festival of global importance.

Tavener died in 2013 after a spiritual life mainly focused on Christianity but with swerves into various esoteric byways. He wanted, he said, to produce music that was the sound of God, surely a red-alert statement for non-believers, but his intention was to separate his creativity from any sense of his own life´s story. The Veil of the Temple, written in 2003, eight epic hours of spiritual outpouring, filled the Usher Hall with awe – a mesmeric, heart-grabbing, experience which allowed every listener to expand into a personal space in which to contemplate, be it from a beanbag or seat. So saying, it was hard to listen without descending into remarkably conflicting spirals: doubt, life´s ethereality, moments of numb disbelief, and great surges of joy.

Those who dismiss Tavener as a over-emotional peddler of mystic ear-pleasing are simply wrong. Tavener is no cynic. His extraordinary courage in exploring our miseries, our outrage at sin, ultimately builds a stupendous celebration. We may be wretched, but glowing radiance has its place. While Tavener´s early work included jolly barbs at what he saw as pretentiousness – a late 1960s cantata was released on The Beatles’ Apple record label no less – his music for this new century has extreme stillness and a unique seriousness. Generally tonal, The Veil careers into cacophony and chaos – usually through clattering repetitive text, with long devastating monotone solo narratives which inform and sometimes wail in alarm, sung here with astonishing and unflinching resonance.

To dispense with the practical at an event of totally splendid impracticality, we heard massed choral forces: Edinburgh Festival Chorus and the Monteverdi Choir joined latterly with thrilling verve by Scotland´s National Youth and Chamber Choirs. Four principal soloists sang from an ingenious tiered platform mid-stalls and from the main stage. A further three roamed far recesses, and choristors brought a heady sense of ritual, bearing candles, wraith-like among the audience. The Monteverdis sang unseen from balcony areas, unearthly sounds floating towards the platform where great blasts of harmony reeled towards them. The youth choirs, flanking the Grand Circle, made a shining noise. Wonderfully strange instruments sat onstage, a duduk sounding like a wonky, seductive oboe, a growling Tibetan horn and percussion flanked by an Indian harmonium. The Usher Hall organ muttered dark and menacing bass.

Two silent contributors shared Tavener´s triumph: Sophie Jeannin, conducting, did what great conductors do: in an astonishing feat given the mass of moving parts, with clear, disciplined actions, she simply disappeared into the music. The results were seamless, beautiful, supremely varied and confident. Tom Guthrie, directing, brought theatricality and ritual to hours which passed as minutes. His distinctive hallmarks are a pristine attention to detail which then transmutes into a profound simplicity. In a work where gestures might slip into cliché, we felt only community, the sense of sharing something monumental. Fine soloists Sophie Burgos, Florian Stortz, baritone and tenor Hugo Hyman sang still as statues soared, startling.

So we reached Part 8 long after the sky had darkened. Brass players from Scottish National Orchestra joined in a riot of overwhelming sound as Alleluhias roared from the stage and balcony. Tears flowed, from the music, the audience, and most probably the heavens. For a festival just beginning, we have a lot more truth to seek.

MARY MILLER

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Colin Currie & The King’s Singers

Queen’s Hall

★★★★☆

The mix of percussionist Colin Currie and The King’s Singers for Saturday’s Queen’s Hall series opener was intoxicating, Currie exclusively on marimba like a mellow energiser to the vocal sextet’s silken trademark ensemble.

Steve Martland’s caustic Street Songs framed an interweaving miscellany of Stanley Glasser's charmed Zulu lullaby Lala Mntwana, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ sweet-scented pop ballad Alive, the beguiling mini-drama of Peter Louis van Dijk’s Horizons, plus a new commission from James MacMillan, along with bespoke arrangements of their own existing works by Missy Mazzoli and baritone-turned-composer Roderick Williams. If death was a permeating theme, it wasn’t always in the most miserable sense.

Take MacMillan’s A Bunch o’ Craws, a sardonic play on the kids’ song Three Craws Sat Upon a Wa’, redrafted (now seven craws) as a parodic skit, the Oxbridge vowels of the Singers admirably replaced by Glaswegian street brogue, Currie joining in vocally, and convincingly, as the craw “that couldnae sing at a’”

Williams’ homage to Renaissance composer Thomas Weelkes, Death Be Not Proud, uttered ghostly sighs. Magical elements in Mazzoli’s introspective Year of Our Burning were dampened by emptier moments. A couple of the King’s voices tired towards the end, but the group's legendary charisma prevailed.

KEN WALTON

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