Southern Counter-Tenors

Southern Counter-Tenors, Portsmouth Cathedral, June 23.

It said in the Times on Saturday that the countertenor was a difficult sell, an acquired taste or a minority interest, I forget exactly what it said. I wouldn't have thought so but I'm sure there are record sales figures to prove it. Certainly record companies seem keen to market their respective assemblages of young tenors, dressed to impress but with their bow ties studiously undone as if they're on their way home from a bit of a shindig.

The Southern Counter-Tenors, 'back by popular demand' at the Portsmouth Festivities, are a valiant reply to such tenor dominance. They put on another very varied programme as the midsummer darkness gathered around St. Thomas's Cathedral. The duets were among several highlights. It's probably fair to say that Jason Stanbridge-Howard and Nick Pepin (whose picture I've lifted from elsewhere to here) are the star names and they opened with Purcell's Sound the Trumpet, a glorious baroque masterpiece which sadly was the only time we saw Hattie McCall Davies providing cello accompaniment. If there's one thing I enjoy more than a countertenor, it's a cello. This was immediately followed by a contrasting but very effective Missa Deus Genitor Alme with the singers hidden in the depths of the cathedral making a tremendously evocative and well-modulated sound.
A small ensemble setting of the Mozart Ave Verum Corpus caught the mood beautifully, Tom Watts provided my old favourite from third form Music, Where'er You Walk before a Bach duet. Jason's solo, Dvorak's Wen de Dich zu mir, was forlorn and wintry before apparently ending on a warmer note but even more ambitious, and perhaps the top highlight, was the Variations on Veni Creator by Durufle and it won't be often that I put Durufle top of any list of preferences. The singers were spread throughout the floor, and above it, their plainsong punctuating the organ passages to show off
the acoustics of the place, the fine sound the blended voices make and one of the more fulfilling of Durufle's works, which I believe extend only to Opus 11.
The later part of the programme relaxed into more comedic, easier listening with Flanders and Swann, a poem celebrating the Magna Carta in droll fashion and Jason made some early forays into camp theatrics which were to be more fully realized not much later.
As I believe they did last year, the group ended with the Clark arrangement of the Tallis Canon, a lively tintinabulation and sharing of parts, one of the pieces in which Alastair Hume, co-founder of the King's Singers, took part. It was a memorable and fine ending before the deserved encore, a semi-staged performance of the Meow Song which finally allowed Mr. Stanbridge-Howard the opportunity he had probably been waiting for all night to camp it up more than most Cathedrals (even including Catholic ones at High Mass) are usually witness to. I am no great authority on matters ecclesiastical but I don't believe that even the Pope disports himself in a pink boa very often. Not in public, anyway. If one had to find fault- and I don't really want to- one might say that the programme's variety was stretched plenty far enough. Speaking personally as a devout atheist fan of devotional church music, I'd have been happy with the baroque, the plainsong and the glory of the countertenor voice but it is the Festivities after all, and boys will be boys and must have their fun.