Sometimes the Royal Albert Hall can feel less like the nation’s village hall, as its jolly nickname goes, and more like its cathedral. A deconsecrated one, though. Two Proms on consecutive nights were devoted to major choral works, both religiously inspired but written to touch a human rather than a divine audience.
The Proms debut of the French ensemble Pygmalion, under its director Raphaël Pichon, brought a performance of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers that used the venue for theatrical effect, evoking the lofty balconies of St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, even if Monteverdi didn’t write this music to be performed there. It started in almost complete darkness, with the choir facing away from most of the audience. The men sang out the plainsong Lord’s Prayer in unrefined, monkish tone. Then a solo tenor voice drifted down from high above us at the back – and before we knew it the stage was lit, the choir was facing us and the first big chorus was under way.
The balcony running around the top of the Albert Hall auditorium was ideal for the echo effects Monteverdi wrote into this work. Although given that the choir was small and everyone, even the soloists, were needed downstairs most of the time, it presented challenges. One soprano could only get up the four floors to the balcony in time for her next entry by kicking off her heels as soon as she left the stage and making a sprint for it.
It was worth it: these echoing exchanges, with maximum spatial separation, provided the most haunting moments of the evening. And in this intoxicating, mercurial score, there was a lot of competition. The ensemble was luxuriant, with harps, theorbos, twin harpsichords, recorders and sackbuts – forerunners of the trombone. Nimble violinists and cornettists made other echo effects, with one player centre stage and one, back turned, at the side. The tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro sang the gorgeous almost-aria Nigra sum at the front, from memory, and such was his delivery that you might have thought it was something ardent by Puccini. The end of the Laudate Pueri, when all that choral brightness and complexity fades away to leave just two solo tenors, was beautifully handled.
The singers popped up in lots of places – above the stage in front of the organ was a favourite – and by the end the moving around had become relentless. Each shift in the grouping of solo voices in the music brought about a shift in where the singers were standing, often to scant audible effect, and there was usually someone prowling around the side of the stage, heading for their next station. Pichon conducted buoyantly and clearly. Perhaps he could have experimented more with the balance in the choir, bringing out specific lines and shaping them all the way to their conclusion – but this performance achieved a remarkable intensity, and there were several silences when you could hear a pin drop. It is extraordinary what power this sometimes baffling 400-year-old work has on a modern audience.
The following night, with William Christie conducting the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in the 1739 oratorio Israel in Egypt, the theatricals were all in Handel’s music. That’s if you except the seemingly random addition at the very start of a percussionist walking on from the side, playing rolls on a drum slung from his shoulder, the kind of drum you might expect to have angry people with pitchforks behind it.
Perhaps this was to put us in the mood for mourning, which is the mood for Part One of the oratorio, a series of 13 Lamentations with no solo numbers to break them up. It is cumulatively heavy going for choir and audience, even when performed with as much life as this. The Lamentations section was removed for a revised second version of the oratorio during Handel’s lifetime, and performances usually favour the shorter two-part version. But it was good to hear it here, beautifully sung and with Christie drawing out all the colour of the music.
Still, the other two parts came almost as light relief. There was fine solo singing, with Dingle Yandell standing out for sheer projection in his duet with bass Callum Thorpe, and a grand swell of choir sound in the choruses that bookend Part Three. It’s Part Two, however, that’s the real reason for performing Israel in Egypt. Handel had a lot of fun depicting the Plagues of Egypt in musical form, and Christie’s performers really got their teeth into the imagery. The nasal distaste with which the choir sang about the flies and lice, the poise of Christopher Lowrey’s alto aria about the frogs as the violin lines jumped all around him, the swagger of the brass as they introduced the hailstones – all this made it sound almost as if God were rather enjoying himself.
• The BBC Proms continue until 9 September.
