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.
Cargill appeared again at the end of the concert to deliver a lustrous creamy-toned Dido’s Lament from Dido and Aeneas, with the choir adding With Drooping Wings, the chorus that closes Purcell’s opera. The other substantial work in the evening was Tippett’s Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, but before it Kantos gave gleamingly polished accounts of two short choral works with strings, Falling by the Denmark based Nick Martin, its simple musical idea beautifully worked out in Gavin Bryars-like harmonies, and Sally Beamish’s Showings, three grave, almost spectral settings of 14th-century texts by Julian of Norwich.
Having set themselves such a high standard in the rest of the concert, the Camerata did not quite reach the same heights in the Fantasia Concertante. Perhaps Menezes pushed some passages too briskly, not giving their lyricism the chance to blossom, but textures seemed a little congested, solo passages too flamboyant in what is one of Tippett’s most gorgeously ecstatic scores.
