The repertoire of Paul Hillier’s Denmark-based vocal ensemble spans 10 centuries, but very often it’s the music the group has commissioned and introduced that dominates its concerts. True to form, the programme that Hillier and the Theatre of Voices brought to Kings Place included new works by Nigel Osborne and Julia Wolfe, both receiving their London premieres. They framed a piece that is now almost half a century old, and qualifies as a contemporary classic.
Strictly speaking neither of the new pieces was a cappella. In Osborne’s The Tree of Life, the four singers were accompanied by an oud, the Middle Eastern lute, played by Rihab Azar. The piece comes out of Osborne’s experience of working in a Syrian refugee camp in the Bekaa valley in Lebanon; each of the seven texts relates to objects – a rosary, an olive branch, a balloon – that were of particular significance to members of the workshop team that Osborne was training. His effective, often touching settings are lucidly tonal, with the oud adding just occasional embroidery to the vocal textures.
In Wolfe’s Italian Lesson the “accompaniment” is supplied by the vocalists themselves, as they use “sound-making objects” – a branch with rustling dry leaves, a clip-clopping toy horse – to provide the backdrop to Wolfe’s setting of a beautiful poem by Cynthia Zarin. The poem is printed in both Italian and English, and as it commutes between the two languages, the music sometimes dwells on a single phrase, sometimes moves forward more decisively, always seeming natural and responsive, always acutely aware of the weight and meaning of every word.
Between the two premieres came music by Arvo Pärt, his Missa Syllabica, from 1977. It’s one of Pärt’s earliest “tintinnabuli” pieces, in which the melodic lines and harmonies are based on common triads, and this glowing setting of the ordinary of the mass, syllable by syllable as the title suggests, shows the effectiveness of that pared-down style. But it also served as a reminder how much the wonderfully limpid, immaculately tuned performances of the Theatre of Voices have been conditioned by its deep experience of Pärt’s works, and how in turn that sound world has so frequently found its way into the music it has commissioned from other composers.
