Film

The Passion of Joan of Arc, Old Fruitmarket, Glasgow

Keith Bruce

four stars

Baritone Donald Greig is a modern Renaissance man, whose singing career with the Tallis Scholars and as a founding member of the Orlando Consort is combined with being a published novelist and, here, as the deviser of the programme he and his colleagues provide to soundtrack an early cinema classic by Carl Theodor Dreyer. For that he has become a pre-Renaissance man, assembling a collage of unaccompanied singing by fourteenth and fifteenth century composers whose liturgical music might have been known to assiduous mass-attender Joan of Arc herself.

The justification for this radical approach is that the Danish filmmaker is documented as having been unhappy with music written or arranged for his work from is premiere in 1928 through to a 1951 version. The difficulty with it is that it makes watching the film even more of a quasi-religious, rather than a (historical and political) narrative experience, a process that has clearly been underway since the original Danish title, which translates as Joan of Arc's Suffering and Death, became the Christ-like "Passion" for the Paris premiere.

Greig's awareness of all of this is, however, quite clear in his programme note, so it is more the point to praise the Consort's singing of his clever compilation, in relays of trios more often than as a full quintet, and his sensible use of silence at times of the highest drama and most remarkable cinematography.

Because in the final analysis it is the movie that is the greater wonder. Dreyer's palette of tracking shots, pans, extreme close-ups, atmospheric angles and brilliant editing is startlingly ahead of it time - and his cast, led by Renee Maria Falconetti as Jeanne, are simply superb.