Review: CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS WITH THE CORINTHIANS at St. John's Church, Adelaide

Reviewed by Ewart Shaw, Friday 18th December 2020.

The invitation was quite simple; Celebrate Christmas with the Corinthians.

It has been touch and go for live music in Adelaide. Choirs rehearse, taking all the precautions prescribed, and then a lockdown. It's only recently, with the easing of restrictions and bursts of confidence, that some of our seasonal entertainments have been offered. The Corinthian Singers have postponed their Sing Your Own Messiah until Easter of next year.

The Corinthian Singers have been part of Adelaide's music life for over fifty years. Some of the founding members are still around, though no longer in the choir. Their current Musical Director is Alastair Knight, assisted by Nicola Hardie-Beveridge. This concert also featured Peter Kelsall as the pianist and organist.

This year's programme of nineteen separate pieces was delivered with the keynote clarity of the choir in terms of diction, delivery, and balance. How do you fit so much music into a little more than an hour? Choose a selection of pieces, short but perfectly formed, drawn from various traditions, and by composers little known to Adelaide choral circles. Alastair Knight joked that he didn't know what the Z stood for in the name Z. Randall Stroope. It's Zane.

The vocal balance of the choir was exemplary, and the sopranos, especially, could float a descant over the other voices with ease. Most of the descants were composed by Philip Ledger when he was director of the Choir of Kings College, Cambridge.

The four Christmas Motets of Poulenc were separated out, to act as markers through the evening.

It's only since my choir, Quire St Nicolas, sang Bethlehem Down, and I heard the Corinthians perform it, that I completely grasp the significance of the words. Mary has put aside the gifts from the Magi until her son becomes the king as promised.

Philip Heseltine, who wrote as Peter Warlock, and his librettist, Bruce Blunt, were desperately short of cash and entered a newspaper competition, which they won, for a new carol. They then went out on a major carouse. I went to the local for a glass of wine with some dear old friends.

What reinforced the lightness of the concert was a side effect of the pandemic. The choir can sing, suitably distanced from each other, but the congregation, the audience, can't. The popular Christmas songs were delivered with grace and articulation, without the people rising clumsily, noisily to their feet, without the congregation singing loudly, and frequently flat, and without at least one man trying to work out whether to sing the melody an octave down, sing at pitch, or attempt to remember the bass part.

There are three tenors, two male and one female, and three basses. Only one of the basses is under sixty, and visibly much younger than the others. Where are the singing men of Adelaide, the lost generations who sang at school, at church, and then gave it away? It is one of the most effective forms of aerobic exercise, mental acuity, and communal activity. I remember, years ago, talking to a visiting chorister at a university choral festival. He joined his university choir because of the large number of sopranos and altos he would meet at rehearsal. He ended up with a baritone, but that's life.

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