Malcolm Williamson’s choral music is admirable for its concepts, its expansive dimension, its harmonic adventurousness, and its intriguing, constantly shifting momentum; it’s difficult to love, however, mostly for the same reasons. How you relate to these pieces, which are fairly representative of Williamson’s style and output, largely depends on your fondness for long stretches of thick-textured, closely clustered or just plain dissonant harmonies, angular melodic lines that often seem at odds with accompanying material, and restless rhythms and tempos.
The Symphony for Voices, which opens the program, begins with a three-and-a-half-minute unaccompanied alto solo that the liner-note writer calls “an audacious move”. “Audience-killer” is more like it. If the melody were more interesting–it sounds like a 1960s conservatory composition exercise–and perhaps if it were performed by a singer other than this very throaty alto whose words are almost impossible to understand, I’d be more enthusiastic about the idea. It doesn’t help that we are not given any texts for this or for most of the other works–too bad, since some of the texts (including poetry by Australian James McAuley) are not familiar yet are critical to understanding the music. The one text we do get–the Requiem–is one we already know well and don’t really need.
And speaking of the Requiem for a Tribe Brother, written on hearing of the death of an Aborigine friend, it’s an unusual mix of what sounds like early 20th-century English cathedral style with Williamson’s very modern vocal writing. The Kyrie, Pie Jesu, and Agnus Dei belong to the former, while the Libera me, for example, makes the impression of a kind of ancient tribal dance.
The singers, of course, are first-rate, virtuoso musicians who go after Williamson’s densest, thorniest passages fearlessly and confidently, while creating the desired warmth and brilliance in the Britten-like “New Guinea” movement of the Symphony and in the above-mentioned sections of the Requiem. The difficult job of capturing vocal detail while maintaining the ensemble balances in this kind of music is admirably achieved here, in a hall with just the right ambience and space for the 30-plus singers’ voices to pleasingly blend and resonate. This is one for fans and for the newly curious.
