Brett Weymark. Photo © Keith Saunders.
English composer Joby Talbot’s Path of Miracles for voices and percussion was written in 2005 for the vocal ensemble Tenebrae, who recently took the work on an extended international tour which included the Melbourne Festival. With the memory of that performance still relatively fresh, it was good to hear the work performed once again, this time by the Chamber Singers of Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (some of the SPCs elite singers) in the extraordinary new space of St Patrick’s Cathedral in Parramatta within its resonant acoustic and enhanced by its dramatic liturgical furnishings.
A Christian pilgrim is one who is on a pathway seeking the sacred and Talbot’s setting along with a libretto by Robert Dickinson explores over its four movements the changing landscapes and accompanying emotions of visiting four main destinations on the way to the shrine of St James The Great: Roncesvalles, Burgos, León and Santiago de Compostela. The work was inspired when the composer himself undertook this famous and ancient pilgrimage. Using several medieval texts, the pilgrim hymn Dum Pater Familias is also interwoven, sung in Greek, Latin, Spanish, Basque, French, English and German.
On Friday night the work was atmospherically staged in semi darkness, unfortunately rendering it impossible to read the multilingual text in the printed program with its footnote translations. The ensemble processed around the space strewn with rose petals and lined with devotional candles as they performed along with soloists strategically placed.
Having now heard the work twice, I can report there are very effective and memorable moments, such as its opening when tenors and basses sing harmonics over a long ascending glissando such as the composer heard sung by the Bunun people in Taiwan. It is an effective and efficiently written composition. That said, this is a work that does not travel far in a hurry. Familiarity did not dispel a sense of the work’s overall sense of repetitiveness, with large passages seemingly cut and pasted and structures that overly relied on layers of material interspersed and juxtaposed.
Save for regular tuning issues and pitching of intervals, the thirty-two members of the Chamber Singers under the direction of Brett Weymark gave a well-prepared performance of the work, demonstrating a particularly polished soprano line. There were effective solos from within the choir throughout, notably by the falsettist William Yaxley. The performance included decorative punctuations by Claire Howard Race playing crotales and Buddhist temple bells, not always securely.
3 ½ stars ★★★☆
Path of Miracles
Presented by Sydney Philharmonia Choirs
Friday 17 August, 2018
St Patrick’s Cathedral, Parramatta
