A masterly synthesis of old & new: Review: Perth Festival, Ora Singers

The Herald Scotland

23-05-2025

St John's Kirk, Perth
The opening concert of this year's Perth Festival of the Arts was a festival debut for the Ora Singers, 18 unaccompanied voices under the direction of Suzi Digby, but the choir made such varied use of the fine acoustic of St John's Kirk they might have been based there.
The programme, which drew an excellent first night audience for this year's event, was the now-familiar mix of Renaissance polyphony and contemporary responses to such early music, framed by the Miserere settings of Allegri and Sir James MacMillan. The former began the programme in a transept of the building with most of the choir then processing around the audience while an unseen quartet of voices answered them.
Ora Singers conducted by Suzi Digby at St John's Kirk in Perth (Image: free) The theatre of that opening found further echoes throughout the evening, especially a central sequence where male voice plainchant, Alma Redemptoris Mater, preceded a sextet singing Cecilia McDowell's setting of the same text. That mirroring technique also ran through the programme, an Ave Marie by Victoria followed by Mark Simpson's, which is full of arresting chords and interesting rhythms and showcased the bedrock of lower male voices that is a real strength of this ensemble.
Among the more familiar Marian Latin words, two settings of the Song of Solomon's Sicut Lilium, from Renaissance France (Antoine Brumel) and by John Barber were more unusual offerings, and they were preceded by Francis Poulenc, whose voice was, as always, singularly distinctive.
Another outlier was the recent commission in the programme, An End Without End by Electra Perivolaris, who is based on the Isle of Arran and was mentored in Ayrshire by MacMillan. Her setting of 17th century Scots poet William Drummond was more fragmentary in style, using solo voices, duet, trio and quartet as well as larger ensemble.
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Digby's direction of these details was light-touch, while she was very old-school in her conducting of works like Palestrina's Assumpta est Maria, which was all the better for her rigorous time-keeping. David Bednall's setting of the same text was another highlight, with ear-catching syncopations and a rich choral climax.
The MacMillan, however, could be the only choice to end the concert, its masterly synthesis of old and new in a class of its own, and the point at the evening when the six sopranos of the Ora Singers demonstrated a sectional solidity not always evident earlier.