King's Singers open Lake District Summer Music in style

8:10am Friday 6th August 2010

By Clive Walkley

Each year, Lake District Sumer Music opens in style with a major concert by a group of musicians of international standing. This year was no exception as the King’s Singers took to the stage in Kendal Parish Church to present a varied programme which delighted a near-capacity audience.

As a brand name, the King’s Singers have a long history. The membership of the group has changed over the years; many former members have moved on to other branches of the music profession to be replaced by a new generation of singers, but the technical skill and cool, creamy sound, which has been a distinguishing feature of the group over such a long period, has remained and is instantly recognisable.

Listening to the six-man ensemble, justly described in the LDSM Souvenir Book as ‘one of the world’s most celebrated vocal groups,’ it was not hard to see why the group has earned this reputation. One word sums up their performance: faultless. Ensemble, tuning, blend, rhythmic precision, articulation – all the qualities one looks for in a good vocal ensemble - are there in abundance.

The programme demonstrated the group’s versatility: motets and anthems from the renaissance period, romantic partsongs from the nineteenth century, and complex works from our own time – all presented with technical skill, and humour when called for, as in Paul Drayton’s Masterpiece, a light-hearted affectionate tribute to seven masters of classical music, written in response to the King’s Singers’ Composers Competition in 1981.

Another highlight was the South African composer Peter Louis van Dijk’s lovely Horizons – a piece inspired by a San Bushman cave painting dating back to the 1700s reflecting the destruction of an ancient peaceful way of life by the arrival of European so-called civilisation. The sheer simplicity of this piece was striking – and moving!

Meanwhile, the following morning, the youthful Vardanyan String Quartet made a welcome return to LDSM, presenting works by Haydn, Schubert and Grieg to a capacity audience in Ambleside’s Parish Centre. The acoustics of this building are not ideal for a string quartet; the hard surfaces of the walls and flooring can make strings sound strident. But any discomfort felt is entirely due to the building and not the players who astonished the audience with their virtuosity and musicianship. The four players are well matched: they play with energy – indeed, ferocity at times - but always to achieve a musical end. Their performance of Haydn’s Lark quartet was beautifully playful and the finale, played at an exhilarating breakneck speed, was at the same time clearly articulated and never got out of control. Grieg’s rarely heard string quartet received a highly-charged, dramatic performance.