Chor-Farmer choir

Press, 29 February 1984, Page 8

Chor-Farmer choir

Chor-Farmer, presented by the Christchurch Festival, at the State Trinity Centre. February 28, 8 p.m. Reviewed by Philip Norman. The Festival is upon us. The concert programme of what promises to be a stimulating three weeks of arts and entertainment began last evening at the State Trinity Centre with a performance of quality by the Japanese male voice choir, Chor-Farmer. The 40-voice choir comprises students of the Tokyo University of Agriculture. They are now on their fourth tour of Australia and New Zealand, conducted by Hiroshi Masumoto, the founder-director of the choir. A safe, undemanding selection was chosen for last evening’s programme. That was a pity, for the technique and clinical ability of the choir were such that it deserved to be extended beyond the generally unimaginative fare pre--y The discipline of theft.

singers was excellent, their pitching sure, their phrases neatly tailored, and their contrasts of dynamics well shaded. A bracket of bland, westernised Japanese songs opened the evening. All were confidently sung, but the lack-lustre material failed to excite. The one exception to this was the explosive “Tatara” (bellows), which combined elements of traditional Japanese music and twentiethcentury sounds in a powerful mixture of speech, song, vocal dips and slides, and onomatopoeic repetition. Had there been more music of this ilk, the concert would have been a riveting one. A selection of the Kings Singers material in the second half came close to recapturing the life and vitality of “Tatara.” Of these, “Laughing” stood out for the choir’s enviable control and agility in the rapid-fire • belly-laugh sequences, and “Street Music” for the

sparkling depiction of exuberant street musicians at work. The accompanist of the choir, Hiroshi Nagao, gave a fiery performance of Rachmaninov’s Piano Sonata No. 1 and a sensitive rendition of Debussy’s “Arabesque.” Both worked well and helped erase the memory of a bracket of saccharine pop songs, sweetly sung, but made over-sentimental by the choir. An impressive “Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child” acted as an encore to a cleanly given bracket of Schubert songs. These were technically up to the mark, but lacked the great depth of feeling needed to be fully satisfying. In all, in spite of reservations, it was an enjoyable concert, lasting impressions being those of the remarkable discipline and obvious enthusiasm for their work of the.- neatly presented youth ®ioir.