Perth Festival: VOCES8

St John’s Kirk of Perth, 29/05/26

VOCES8

Probably the hottest ticket (so far) of this year’s Perth Festival of the Arts was top-flight vocal group VOCES8 in St John’s Kirk on the night of 29th May, in a programme of a cappella choral music themed around the heavens, human connection, and the places we call home, titled 'Give Me Your Stars'.  In any event, it was sold out.  Unfortunately, the stars had conspired to visit a seasonal ailment on one of the singers, necessitating a handful of changes to the programme, and one of the resulting casualties was the very same new piece, written specifically for VOCES8, that had given its name to the evening, Lucy Walker’s 'Give Me Your Stars', billed as capturing “the delicate balance between celestial wonder and the deep, personal connections that make us human”.  Nursing a summer cold myself, and aware that while it persists my vocal compass has dropped a fifth, I can empathise.  And, in truth, it was no privation.  A diverse basket of slightly different goodies is still a basket of goodies.

Tomás Luis de Victoria’s 1576 ‘Regina Caeli’ (Queen of Heaven), the gifted Spaniard’s luminous take on richly ornamented Venetian Late Renaissance antiphonal polyphony, set the ball rolling with lighter rhythmic ‘Alleluias’ in triple metre alternating with sustained polyphony in 4.  Perfect blending exploited St John’s acoustic fully to produce a sound that was at once ancient and immediate.  For the rest of the programme, different members of the ensemble took turns at introducing the pieces.  As with many a cappella vocal ensembles, the vocalists rearranged spatially to match the expressive demands of each piece, but always in a shallow arc standing facing the nave.

A leap forward of four and a half centuries took us to Eric Whitacre’s 2022 ‘All Seems Beautiful to Me’.  A mood of gentle reverie was expressed in slowly shifting harmonies, with occasional unresolved suspensions followed by the sweetest resolutions.  Note values seemed to match natural speech and there was no awareness of bar lines.  An inspired juxtaposition gave us a contrast to the Victoria, yet both were equally beautiful.

Five days after The Gesualdo Six and Fretwork had given us a feast of ‘Secret Byrd’ in the same venue, the replacement for the Lucy Walker piece brought us back to the English Renaissance with Byrd’s 1611 ‘Praise our Lord, all ye Gentiles’, the covert Catholic on his best behaviour writing in English for the English Protestant court.  Joyful polyphony with a big rich coda on ‘Amen’.  The evening’s  first foray into jazz arrived in the guise of an arrangement by Jim Clements of the theme songs of two Bond movies, blended into a single piece.  John Barry’s ‘You Only Live Twice’ and Bill Conti’s ‘For Your Eyes Only’ were expertly intertwined with some scrumptious jazz chords: very stylish.

All but one piece of the rest of the printed programme’s first half fell by the wayside but were replaced by equally unmissable goodies.  Otis Blackwell’s ‘Fever’ (I’ll never forget Rita Moreno on ‘The Muppet Show’) was smooth and slick, with rhythmic finger-clicking, an iconic bass-line, stylish solos in the verses (including an hilarious Elvis impression; ‘The King’ did cover the song) and a lot of movement by the singers.  Superb.  Bobby McFerrin’s setting of the 23rd Psalm, where ‘he’ is replaced by ‘she’ and the Lord as shepherd and protectrix is actually his mother, was idyllic, simple, pastoral and delicious, concluding with “Glory be to the mother, and to the daughter, and to the Holy of Holies …”.  Magical.  Arvo Pärt’s 2007 motet, ‘The Deer’s Cry’, is a 4-part setting of the ancient prayer ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ commissioned by Louth Contemporary Music Society and first performed in Drogheda in Ireland.  Typical Pärt, with the armour of faith shining in the pauses as much as in the radiant tutti.  Holst’s setting of the ’Nunc dimittis’, a commission from Westminster Cathedral, consciously emulated the glories of Palestrina and brought the first half to a close on the programmed work, the words of Simeon embracing mortality now that he has been granted the privilege of seeing the Messiah.

Breezy Bach, in the form of a Bourrée from one of the English suites, opened the second half in true Ward Swingle style, and indeed the influence of the founder of the Swingle Singers in Paris on the nascent VOCES8 was acknowledged.  In the guise of Swingle 2 (Olive Simpson and Catherine Bott in the line-up), I caught them in the Gaiety in Dublin about 1980 as a birthday treat for my mother.  VOCES8 can ‘doo-be-doo’ and ‘davva-davva’ just as stylishly. 

Two pieces for reduced forces followed.  Schubert’s melodic gift received the fullest expression in the form of ‘Liebe’, a Schiller setting, for 4 lower voices.  A miraculously recovered ‘lost’ Lennon/McCartney number, ‘Free as a Bird’, recently reassembled from tape fragments from sessions in the 60s, enjoyed a very sweet 6-part outing.  We returned to the full ensemble for two folk numbers.  A Jim Clements arrangement of Kate Rusby’s ‘Underneath the Stars’ gave a rich but gentle ensemble sound, with a lovely solo in the last verse, balm for the soul.  Known to some as ‘Emer’s Farewell’, others as ‘Danny Boy’ and others still as ‘The Derry Air’ (with the chuckle that accompanies a bad pun), a lovely arrangement by Joshua Pacey did justice to the deep feelings expressed in the touching song (by any name) with its teasing genuine Irish melody.  Recalling the time when Paul Simon had contacted the ensemble wanting to collaborate (one of those “we thought the e-mail was a scam” stories), the subsequent work was commemorated with Australian alto/conductor/arranger Naomi Crellin’s arrangement of Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Homeward Bound’.  To be honest, considering Paul Simon’s amazing oeuvre, ‘Homeward Bound’ is nowhere near a favourite for me, but the arrangement and its execution were both top-notch.  All of these were exactly as printed in the programme.

Of the next two items on the programme, each another Jim Clements arrangement, only one was sung, and my initial reaction was disappointment, missing Irving Berlin’s ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from the fabulous 1935 ‘Top Hat’ in favour of ‘April in Paris’ from Harburg and Duke’s (entirely forgettable, I would suggest) 1933 revue, ‘Walk a Little Faster’.  But I changed my mind, and what swung it for me was the arrangement, which was sublime.  Those jazz chords: fabulous.  Another happy substitution closed the programme,  Instead of a fusion of ‘I get a kick out of you’ with ‘New York, New York’, we got (more on-theme) a fusion of ‘Come Fly With Me’ and ‘Fly Me to the Moon’, jazzy and stylish to the max.

Or so I thought.  But the final shot in the locker set the bar even higher for an encore: the Nat King Cole classic, ‘Straighten Up and Fly Right’, with some of the sassiest scat singing I’ve ever heard, emulating muted trumpets and sax, trombones, plucked bass and drums.  Fabulous.