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Saturday 4 July 2009

Crescendo of polyphony

Peter Phillips on a Zambian chamber choir which decided to perform Byrd, Tallis and Tippett

As calling cards go, renaissance polyphony would not seem to promise a ticket to anywhere much, unless to heaven. When I started giving concerts in 1973, the received wisdom on the subject, even in the UK, was that whole concerts of it would never draw an audience. How true that was. But slowly perceptions have changed, and not only in the UK. With something of a crescendo, the opportunities to conduct this repertoire have multiplied, taking me to some very unlikely places. So far as Africa goes I had previously worked only in Fez and Cairo; never in any of the sub-Saharan countries. Last week Byrd’s Mass for Four Voices was heard in concert — I assume for the first time — in Lusaka, Zambia.

It was sung by Vox Zambezi, a chamber choir of 14 singers organised by Paul Kelly, the only white member of the group. All the others come from a church choir based in the New Apostolic Church in central Lusaka, where they sing hymns, spirituals and a substantial dose of European baroque and classical music, always accompanied by the organ. Nothing in their church work would have prepared them for the disciplines of renaissance singing — tuning between themselves without accompaniment and singing long legato melodies in counterpoint, as opposed to relying on an underlying rhythmic impulse. They adapted wonderfully well.

The concert programme followed a pattern which has become usual outside the Western concert halls for a cappella events: local folk or religious music interspersed with renaissance items. In this case, the local music ranged from Naja kwako to Mangwani M’pulele which, in Mike Brewer’s dazzling arrangement, has so many cross-rhythms that even the composers of the Ars Subtilior would have wondered what was going on. Midway between the two came Tippett’s Negro Spirituals from A Child of Our Time, which was performed by these singers with the deliberate intention of showing one or two English choirs how Tippett’s music benefits from an African sense of rhythm. Then came the Byrd Mass, his Ave verum and Tallis’s Salvator mundi.

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