Music / Durufle’s Requiem, The Llewellyn Choir. At Anzac Chapel, Duntroon, October 12. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

The Llewellyn Choir has been singing in Canberra since 1980, and named after the founding director of the Canberra School of Music, Ernest Llewellyn. 

The director of the choir for the past 20 years has been the well-respected Canberra musician Rowan Harvey-Martin. The choir (and Harvey-Martin) have long sought out interesting and lesser-known repertoire often incorporating elements of jazz, although in the concert the focus was on music by French composers.

The choir were joined by the Llewellyn Sinfonia (six string players), soprano Sonia Anfilof, baritone Rohan Thatcher, organist James Porteous and their usual pianist and repetiteur Anthony Smith.

The major work in this concert was the Requiem Op. 9 by the mid-20th century composer Maurice Durufle, in one of three instrumental arrangements Durufle created, this one for organ and a small string ensemble including a harp.

The choir had performed this work a couple of years ago under the direction of Toby Cole when Harvey-Martin was sidelined by covid, for that performance using a more minimalist accompaniment of organ and occasional cello.

This is interesting music and well suited for an amateur choir, with plenty going on, but not too much complexity in the scoring. Their singing by the choir was confident and assured, but this is not a loud choir and they were often overwhelmed by the organ up in the balcony at the back of the chapel.

Pipe organs tend not to have volume controls, and from the middle of the chapel (it may have sounded different up the front) the balance just was not there. There were also problems with one pipe, pitched at F, stubbornly remaining open at the end of the Sanctus. The solos sections from Anfilof and Thatcher were excellent, but there was not much of them with most of the vocal parts left to the choir.

The rest of the concert was a mixture, allowing the soloists and string players a spot of their own, as well as a couple of shorter works from the choir.

The first of these, Arvo Part’s Beatitudes, was just too challenging for the choir with the organ accompaniment overly intrusive. Another shorter work by Maurice Duruflé for the choir alone, Ubi Caritas, was quite charming with a young soprano from the choir leading it delightfully.

Anfilof contributed two French art songs, the strings some Respighi and Porteous a couple of Bach organ preludes. All were well done, but it did make the concert a bit unfocused and lacking a little coherence. 

It should also be noted that the rigidly upright wooden pews in the Anzac Chapel might be fine with your young military cadets, but they set a new standard of discomfort for older backs. They make the pews at Wesley seem attractive.