Music

Mr McFall’s Chamber

Old St Paul’s Church, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

THERE will not have been a time since its composition in the 1990s when Georgian composer Giya Kancheli’s chamber oratorio Exil lacked resonance, but its elegy for the displaced is surely even more apposite now than it was when Robert McFall’s group first performed it 16 years ago.

The core quartet joined by soprano Susan Hamilton and SCO principal flute Alison Mitchell, with Graeme McNaught on synthesiser and Pippa Murphy on lap top sampling, the composer’s palette is distinctive and yet quickly becomes familiar, if never exactly reassuring, that hardly being the message of the work. There is the feel of a secular Requiem to the piece, with both its twentieth century librettists among the departed. Paul Celan’s precision-imaged verse reveals a complex relationship with faith, while Hans Sahl’s lines, which close the work and give it its title, are bleaker but set to more flowing music of adult lament.

It is a very moving journey from the setting of the 23rd Psalm that opens the work, and which is itself immediately undercut by a coda from Psalm 9: “The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they have made.”

Hamilton – as pure-toned as ever – was careful to give all the words equal weight in a beautifully measured performance in which the singer has an ensemble role, with Mitchell’s alto and bass flutes, brief synth figures and harmonics on Brian Schiele’s viola other recurring elements. With Murphy adding bells and the soprano’s own voice to the mix as the work unfolds, the performance was an acoustic marvel in the church acoustic, the players achieving quite remarkable clarity and balance, even in the most complex exchange of phrases.

The first of a concert sequence entitled At Home in a Foreign Land, there is brand new music to be heard next from the McFalls, with Festival Fringe concerts at the Brunton and Queen’s Hall.