Chamber ensembles are more than the sum of their parts. In an ensemble of six or fewer musicians, each performer's tone and timbre is critical, and the musical identities must all blend together flawlessly.
The King's Singers, a vocal ensemble of six men, was founded almost forty years ago, and understandably, the personnel has changed from time to time over the years. This year's configuration of the Singers brought to McCarter Theatre last Tuesday night two counter-tenors, two tenors, a baritone, and a bass, in a concert marked by vocal diversity, as well as precise and exact singing.
The six men who comprise the King's Singers all have been with the ensemble for varying periods, several of them joining within the past five to ten years. The vocal anchor seems to be bass Stephen Connolly, who has been part of the ensemble for almost twenty years, likely replacing one of the original members in the mid-1980s. Although he has the most color-filled voice of the sextet (and a tone that occasionally seemed reedy compared to the others), throughout the first half of primarily Renaissance music, the ensemble gelled well together, centered around his voice, as well as that of David Hurley, the highest counter-tenor.
The King's Singers cannot succeed without uniformity of vowel, and that was certainly in evidence from the opening piece by Adrian Willaert. The works selected for the first set of Italian madrigals included a wide range of 16th century vocal effects and styles. The madrigals of Carlo Gesualdo were particularly loaded with harmonies and tuning effects well ahead of their time. These dramatic shifts and tuning anomalies were expertly handled by the ensemble, with the anguish of the text well expressed. Also well blended was Jacques Arcadelt's Il bianco e dolce cigno.
The King's Singers has had a long tradition of bringing contemporary choral music to the forefront, and Cyrillus Kreek's Four Estonian Psalms were certainly worthy of the attention. Rarely heard outside of Estonia, Kreek's choral music draws from Estonian folk music, as well as a stately homophonic style prevalent in Eastern European choral music of the 20th century. The dark harmonies of these pieces worked well for the ensemble, and Mr. Connolly and baritone Christopher Gabbitas blended particularly well in the second selection, Onnis on inimene. Counter-tenor Robin Tyson, a more recent addition to the ensemble, has an especially nice solo in the fourth selection setting of Psalm 121.
The ensemble also presented two works which had been commissioned by the sextet, both of which were rooted in Japanese poetry and Haiku. The Singers did not need to produce a great deal of sound in the acoustic of McCarter, and the words, especially of the Haiku settings by Toru Takemitsu, were clearly heard.
Even more than classical choral literature, the King's Singers are known for their rendition of popular songs and lighter works, recalling a close harmony tradition begun by the Comedian Harmonists in the 1930s and replicated on many college campuses (including Princeton). Previous members of the ensemble have also served as arrangers, and the ensemble has had long-standing collaborations with arrangers such as Daryl Runswick, whose Blackbird was one of the highlights of this closing set. The ensemble has also been known for programming humorous works, including their closing arrangement of Old MacDonald Had a Farm in Italian, in which their expertise at musical (and animal) effects was clear. During this set, it was especially nice to hear baritone Mr. Gabbitas in Philip Lawson's arrangement to Billy Joel's She's Always a Woman. In this selection, even the humming of the other singers was clear throughout the theatre.
The King's Singers have been together, in some form or another, for almost forty years. One thing that has not changed is the ensemble's ability to draw a crowd, and delight the audiences which come to hear them time and time again.
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