Since first collaborating with violinist Jack Liebeck during lockdown, Voces8 have built up a sizeable repertoire for this unusual pairing. At Kings Place on Thursday night they gave us a full recital of it, adding a new commission, Deborah Pritchard’s Dante’s Rose, to what they already have. Their singing was, as always, terrific, and the sympathy with Liebeck apparent, his rich but never overstated sound an ideal foil.
The main item of the first half was an experimental reworking of Bach’s solo Violin Partita No. 2, interlaced with chorales and other Bach fragments. Before that we had a substantial opener by James MacMillan, powerfully scored but somewhat bitty, and the lovely, if sentimental, Effortlessly, by Taylor Scott Davis. Davis is Composer-in-Residence with Voces8 and wrote the piece for the wedding of Barney Smith, the founder and still leader of the group, and if you can’t write something unashamedly sentimental for that kind of occasion, when can you? Liebeck’s ecstatic violin lines floated around and above the voices, offering the warmest of warm sounds. It was very touching.
And then to the Bach. Based on recent scholarship that suggests the partita was Bach’s response to the death of his first wife, this interpretation saw Liebeck play the whole piece, with chorales on the theme of death and hope interspersed, before a final movement – the monumental “Chaconne” – that had fragments of Bach lines underpinning the violin’s virtuoso lines. Was it gilding the lily? Well, undoubtedly yes, and there were times when I felt the choir gave the music a weightiness just when the violin was wanting to take flight. But the chorales were exquisite, giving lovely moments of introspection (I would have liked them to overlap with the violin movements, to keep the momentum) and the “Chaconne” was cast in a new, and fascinating light. Liebeck spared none of the pain etched into the notes, and the choir, mostly singing in pairs rather than tutti, were sensitive in their shading. I was very glad to hear it.
The second half opened with the wonderful Libera Nos by John Sheppard, arranged with the addition of violin by Alexander L’Estrange. Voces8 sounded like Voces16, with a wonderful sense of the massiveness of the music, impassive, treading slowly and inexorably, the violin part feeling thoroughly embedded. This was followed by Caroline Shaw’s much-performed and the swallow, which is always a winner. Then to the premiere. Deborah Pritchard is a painter as well as composer, her music often exploring her experience of synaesthesia. Dante’s Rose is based on the concluding section of The Divine Comedy, and her accompanying visualisation has a powerful sense of movement. The music was full of modal clusters, the Voces8 blend impeccable, Liebeck’s violin flecking the sound, the whole thing glistening with light. The pacing of the build-up was spot on, before dying away to a hypnotic, looping ending.
The final item was the one that first united Voces8 and Liebeck, a rescoring of Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending by Paul Drayton, the choir substituting for the orchestra. Smith (pictured above by Monika S. Jakubowska), a genial host in his spoken introductions, described having Liebeck added to the usual group of eight as giving “a sleepover vibe” and there was something delightfully stretched and easy, if never somnolent, in the performance. Which speaks to the singers’ skills: maintaining an even and sustained sound with the voice is much harder than in the string bed of the original, but the technique in their long-breathed oohs was flawless. They allowed Liebeck to play really quietly and intimately over the top, and with a rhythmic elasticity. In the words of the George Meredith poem that inspired RVW in the first place, and which emerge delightfully in the middle section, it offered “a silver chain of sound”, a phrase that sums up the evening’s collaboration perfectly.
