Into a UK music world that must currently feel like pretty hostile territory to professional choral singers comes Vox Urbane, a new ensemble founded by its conductor Dan Ludford-Thomas and the singer Helen Meyerhoff. If professional choirs too often resemble a public-school reunion in Tunbridge Wells, to paraphrase the founders’ argument, then Vox Urbane aims to choose its 16-strong lineup to offer a different, diverse perspective.
Its launch concert – given in the insta-worthy Asylum Chapel, a candlelit time capsule of distressed stonework and pristine stained glass in a scuffed corner of Peckham – started with Three Songs by Philip Glass, the ensemble clean, the balance pristine. The slippery harmonies of the fiendish eight-movement Figure Humaine by Poulenc, the only dead composer on the programme, were dispatched with stylish assurance. Was it counterintuitive to have so much French sung to a London audience in the first hour of a new ensemble dedicated to inclusivity? Perhaps, but after the interval all was in English – or in nonsense in the case of AEIOU, one of two engaging, rhythmically intriguing pieces by Judd Greenstein originally written for Caroline Shaw’s US ensemble Roomful of Teeth, Meredith Monk’s Panda Chant II, which had the singers stomping, clapping and whooping, and Shruthi Rajasekar’s playful Numbers.
The mood changed for Tara Mack’s Good Morning and Joanna Marsh’s Evening Prayer, in which the singers drew out the expansive lines beautifully; but in the Marsh especially the words got lost. The final two pieces – Room for All by Barbara Dudek and One by Ludford-Thomas – sought to encapsulate the ensemble’s mission statement, flirting with sentimentality as they did so.
The strongest hope for change came courtesy of Vox Next Gen, an offshoot group of nine singers in their teens and early 20s. Hearing singing this polished from a mainly student group outside the context of a university chapel felt, finally, genuinely different.
