Music / Latvian Radio Choir & Genevieve Lacey, At Llewellyn Hall , November 14. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD

At first glance, a collaboration between a 24-voice choir and a recorder player would seem a little unlikely.

There is little existing repertoire for such a combination, but the desire of recorder player Genevieve Lacey to realise a musical setting by Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds of part of Alexis Wright’s novel The Swan Book led to the impressive final work of this concert.

This the first tour of Australia for Musica Viva by the Latvian Radio Choir, with the program mostly built around music with a connection to bird song.

The opening work was a short piece by American composer Caroline Shaw, And the Swallow, which immediately demonstrated the choir’s tone and precision.

Without a break Lacey walked onto the stage and launched into a 17^th century recorder showpiece The English Nightingale by Dutch composer Jacob van Eyck. This work finished with a blistering display of speed and accuracy.

The next three works, two by Estonian composer Arvo Part and one by Felix Mendelssohn had no connection to birds and were performed together as a block with only slight pauses for a setting of pitch between each one.

The two works by Part were settings of Magnificat and Nunc dimittis from 1989 and 2001 with Mendelssohn’s setting of Psalm 22 from a century and a half earlier.

Part’s religious music sounds as if it could be several centuries old one minute and then brought into the present by a burst of modern dissonance.

Nunc dimittis was especially impressive with the choir fading away to nothing on one held chord and then the basses singing block chords at the bottom of their register punctuating utterly different parts from the other three sections.

The first half of the concert was finished by the first of two works by the Australian partnership of Hollis Taylor and Jon Rose which combine recorded bird song from a pied butcherbird with a live recorder part.

The first of these used a wordless manuscript by the Renaissance composer Willam Byrd and hummed by the choir to underpin the birdsong and recorder. Interesting but 12 minutes of it was more than was necessary.

The second, more engaging work, Etheridge River, was shorter and more focused on the intermingling of the recorder and butcherbird.

The second half of the concert opened with a motet by Palestrina with the unusual addition of a recorder part, by another Italian Francesco Rognoni, which followed and embellished to vocal lines.

Returning to the bird themes were the two other major works by Latvian composers Peteris Vasks and Eriks Esenvalds. Vasks’ work is a setting of a poem by Latvian writer Maris Caklais.

Again, the choir showed its precision and control sliding down an entire octave while fading away before a section of chaotic bird calls from the singers and another carefully controlled fadeout to finish.

Esenvalds’ Ceremony of Swans was a fitting finale to the concert with Genevieve Lacey playing a variety of recorders with the choir.

A most interesting piece of music with a theatrical finish as Lacey slowly walked off stage as the choir gently faded away.

An encore of a Latvian folk song and a short rhythmic song by Caroline Shaw finished off this concert by a wonderful choir in a most satisfying manner.

We might wonder why this country does not have a professional choir of this calibre.

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