Ambitious singing by girls’ choir

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33064, 3 November 1972, Page 10

Ambitious singing by girls’ choir

Last evening the Villa Maria Schola Cantorum presented a public concert in the college hall. Directed by Rolf Just and accompanied by Wolfgang Just, the schola sang a difficult programme with conviction and grace. The careful and interesting selection was taken from the twentieth-century repertoire with one exception.

The music was not easy but it was kept within the capabilities of each group’s technique and musicianship. The more difficult and strident idiom of Michael Hurd’s “Canticles of the Virgin Mary” — sung by the whole schola with Elizabeth Day as soloist — gave perspective to earlier selections from Vaughan Williams “The Four Seasons,” sung by the Hortus Musicus, and settings of traditional songs by Vernon Griffiths. In all these performances, Rolf Just’s unobtrusive and precise direction was matched by the choir’s carefullyjudged phrasing and impeccable diction. The range of colour and expression was at its greatest in the Hurd “Canticles,” while the most flexible and subtle performances were in the Griffiths arrangements.

A younger group. Les Petites Chanteuses, opened the programme with three items from a work by Flanders and Horovit, “Captain Noah and his Floating Zoo,” directed and accompanied by Wolfgang Just. This young choir — the schola probationers — was well disciplined, with strong lower voices, but inexperience made it hard for it to project the spirit of the songs.

The programme ended with three unaccompanied compositions sung by the schola. The late sixteenth-century “Monstra te esse Matrem” by Victoria received a rather heavy-handed and unstylistic performance, but the two intricate Kodaly pieces were delightfully presented. —J.M.J.