BBC Singers at Turner Sims

Liz Gre
Frgmntd

Drew Crawford
A reading from the Song of Songs
When the Heart is Cracked or Broken 

Benjamin Oliver
Songs for Stanley

Joby Talbot
Path of Miracles

BBC Singers

James Weeks

The BBC Singers presented contemporary choral music as part of a two-day residency at Southampton University.

The gentle dissonances and wordless exchanges of Frgmntd, a well-crafted and collaborative work by Liz Gre and members of the Quince Ensemble, brought atmospheric reflections on issues of migration and environmental disasters, given a polished rendition. Two involving works by UK-based Australian Drew Crawford illustrated an assured handling of voices in tenderly expressive settings concerning love and loss. Under James Weeks, the Singers brought just the right degree of consolation and hope to Michael Leunig’s poem When the Heart is Cracked or Broken. A welcome change of mood emerged in Benjamin Oliver’s Songs for Stanley – witty settings of nursery rhymes written for his newly-born son in 2014; the BBC Singers at their most unbuttoned.

The bulk of the recital was taken up by Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles; a substantial work from 2005 inspired by the great medieval pilgrimages across northern Spain and concluding at the reputed burial place of St James the Apostle. While the polyglot texts within the four movements extend beyond the purely geographical, their headings – Roncesvalles, Burgos, Leon and Santiago – represent the titles of the Pilgrims’ staging posts, with each part of the journey referencing vocal traditions from medieval France, Renaissance Italy and even Taiwan. It’s a highly individual score in which its pulsing iterations and chant-like reiterations conjure something primordial and strikingly modern with antique cymbals adding to the work’s cultural allusions. The Singers took Talbot’s tour de force in its stride, solo and tutti voices keenly alert to the panorama of techniques, shape-shifting harmonies and multilayered sonorities, nothing less than miraculous.