Sharing the platform with the chamber choir Kantos, Manchester Camerata’s programme under the Brazilian conductor Simone Menezes was a deftly woven sequence in which some pieces were unselfconsciously elided, with subtle connections revealed between many of them. Heralded by a single bell stroke and sung from the rear of the auditorium, Purcell’s unaccompanied Hear My Prayer had begun the concert, seamlessly leading into the string supplications of Arvo Pärt’s Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, before the Kantos singers appeared on stage to mingle with the orchestra for more Pärt, the harmonically becalmed meditation of his Da Pacem Domine.
The concert’s emotional core was Britten’s Phaedra, his gaunt late cantata, setting text from Robert Lowell’s version of Racine’s tragedy. Karen Cargill was the mezzo soprano soloist in a work originally conceived for the voice of Janet Baker, with the austere accompaniment of strings, percussion and harpsichord. On its own terms Cargill’s performance was very fine, passionate and less stoic than some, though the text was sometimes hard to grasp, more a consequence of the Stoller Hall’s warm acoustic, perhaps, than a shortcoming of the performance.
