Schola Cantorum de Venezuela / Llewellyn, Lepper, Edinburgh International Festival 2024 review - scorching energy and deep tenderness

The Queen’s Hall isn’t going to know what has hit it after the opening weekend of this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. What’s usually the festival’s demure home of chamber music – string quartets, piano trios and so on – was still recovering from Jakub Józef Orliński’s theatrics from Saturday morning, when it encountered this scorching performance of choral music from the Schola Cantorum de Venezuela (★★★★★).

The Schola Cantorum’s main reason for being in Edinburgh last weekend was to take part in Golijov's La Pasión según San Marcos in the Usher Hall on Saturday evening, but hearing them on their own was a terrifically compelling experience. You sensed the same energy coursing through their veins, but also the greater tenderness and deeper focus that comes from performing their own music on their own terms.

The vast majority of their programme came from the Americas, mostly Latin America; and they divided it into a first half of Christian music and a second of exploring ancestral rituals. But if you hadn’t known that then you wouldn’t have been able to sense the dividing line. Their first half of Lachrymosas and Alleluias was a world away from the refined precision of a western cathedral choir. This sacred music by the likes of Alvarez and Runestad thumped with tribalistic energy, and demonstrated the Ginastera had in him the raw material of a modernist: who knew?! Be it sacred or secular music, the young performers (pictured above by Andrew Perry) danced,

leapt and drummed around the stage as they sang, their second half beginning of Bilbao’s invocation to St John sounding like an animalistic ritual rather than a hymn to a Christian saint. Yet there was also space for fun in El guayaboso, and even some beautiful part songs from Guastavino and Castellanos.

Often the singing was raw and unchecked, but that only heightened its emotional power, and the seventeen singers moved with such energy and passion that it was impossible not to be swept away by them. Interestingly, the only piece where they struggled, with its stillness and unity, was the most western one, James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn, which took quite a while to settle. That only points up their strengths and priorities, though, and I’d happily sacrifice some of that poetic peace for the unchecked enthusiasm of seeing such a team in their prime.

Director María Guinand was the presiding genius over the whole thing, and she spoke compellingly about each of the pieces they sang. Most movingly, she dedicated the whole concert to their beloved home country, “a country that deserves a future.” We can all agree with that. There was a much more conventional song recital a couple of mornings later. Elizabeth Llewellyn ★★★★) sang her songs in clearly organized sequences with breaks in between, and Simon Lepper’s piano line (Lepper and Llewellyn pictured above by Jess Shurte) was as well behaved as her soprano voice. That voice is beautiful, creamy, voluptuous. The most remarkable thing about the concert was that when she began to sing her first sequence, Finzi’s Till Earth Outwears, she sounded like a contralto, so confident and rich did the voice sound at the very bottom of its range. Elsewhere, the characteristic ripeness was regularly evident in the upper regions of the voice, and if the very top sometimes lacked the n^th degree of precision then you can forgive almost anything when it's 11:00 in the morning.

She sounded at her best in the English language songs, though. The Finzi sequence, alongside Coleridge-Taylor’s Six Sorrow Songs were full of communicative directness and that characteristically English sense of restraint in line with understated melancholy. Her Dvořák Love Songs were also very fine, but her Strauss and Chausson settings were more buttoned-up, the nuances of the language and even the dynamics of the voice all straightened out to a fairly standard mezzo-forte. Simon Lepper’s piano line was consistently essential, however, most especially in the Puccini selection where the piano sang out convincingly a lot of the arching melodies you’d expect from Puccini’s operas. In fact, three of the songs shared melodies from La bohème and La Rondine.

The EIF has largely done away with extensive programme booklets this year and replaced them with freesheets. To compensate for the lack of sung texts, a supertitle screen projects the translations above the singer’s head, a massive improvement in terms of directness and communication. They also provided the morning’s lightest moment: a titter broke out among the audience when the screen announced the title of Finzi’s fifth song: "It never looks like summer". Rarely has that been truer than this year!

• Edinburgh International Festival runs to 25 August
• More classical reviews on theartsdesk