Photo credit: VocalEssence on Flickr
Our verdict – 4/5
Eric Whitacre is the rock star of choral composition. Taking to the stage at the spectacular Union Chapel this week, he grabs the microphone and sticks out his tongue à la Miley Cyrus. “I had better make a promise to the front row now that I won’t start crowd surfing.”
Good job, as the first few rows of pews were primarily made up of affluent Highbury women in Pucci scarves, swooning over Whitacre’s luscious blonde locks, and joined by their teenage sons who have been forced into suits for the occasion.
But the event was anything but stiff. Whitacre, the Nevada-born and Grammy-award-winning composer, is best known for his virtual choir – an assembled 185 clips of performances of ‘Lux Aurumque’ which was a runaway YouTube sensation in 2010.
Usually, he says, he leads his concerts as if conducting a formal dinner party: the appetiser, the fish course, the main spectacle, the refreshing sorbet.
Tonight, rather, he was to offer us “a buffet”, a mish-mash of sorts, melding stuffy choral harmonies with accordions and Nine Inch Nails lyrics. For this is ‘Reimagine’, Whitacre’s attempt at exploring “the boundaries of genre and form with music from chant to pop and rock and beyond”.
And it did indeed feel like a relaxed, family affair. He rolled out guest after guest without much pomp. Laura Mvula was up first. Seemingly apparent on every TV chat-show programme since her debut album Sing to the Moon last year, there she was again: her retro-soul infused earworm hooks backed by Whitacre’s touring troupe of singers.
Her most popular track, ‘Green Garden’, was stripped back of the album’s fussy distortion techniques and lifted to an almost ethereal quality thanks to the looping intricacy of the percussion. ‘She’ was just as beautiful, as if it were made to be sung in church. Mvula bowed out too early, but was replaced by the soaring soprano Grace Davidson.
It is too often that “mash-ups” of genres, especially where classical is concerned, can be dismissed as try-hard and embarrassing. Classical and pop music are usually thrown together as a cringe-inducing attempt at refining the youths. Yet, Whitacre’s choices of collaborators at the Union Chapel were mastered and intelligent.
Davidson’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’s ‘Hurt’, made popular by Johnny Cash, was particularly astounding. It ranged from delicate to breathtakingly fierce, leaving the audience dumb struck.
Meanwhile, Ksenija Sidorova gave a rip-roaring performance with her classical accordion. “The only woman who could make the accordion cool,” Whitacre quipped. British percussionist Joby Burgess also managed to transform Kraftwerk into a craftful piece of classical.
So homely and involving was the whole production, that I even forgave singer-songwriter Marius Beck for his faux-folk drivel and staid cover of ‘Wrecking Ball’.
[…] Read the full article on the Islington Now website. […]