Le Concert Spirituel
St James’s Spanish Place, London

 
THE fourth in a series of Wigmore Hall concerts outsourced to the beautiful Victorian gothic pile of St James’s in Marylebone, this choral performance by the French ensemble Le Concert Spirituel featured five 19th-century composers from France, with Charles Gounod and Gabriel Faure to the fore.
 
Despite the body heat generated by a full house of 800 rapt concert-goers, St James’s is a difficult place to keep warm when there’s a cold snap in progress, and Wigmore Hall director John Gilhooly felt obliged to call upon the “patron saint of church heaters” in his introductory speech, though to no avail.
 
Many of the singers were heavily mufflered, and after a short midway pause some of them reappeared with further items of extra clothing, including shawls.
 
Still, that didn’t lessen the warmth of a concert that went a long way to matching the magnificence of its surroundings.
 
With four of the eight pieces deriving from Gounod’s Messe dite de Clovis, intermingled with other devotional compositions from Alexandre Guilmant, Louis Aubert and Camille Saint-Saens, the emphasis was on spirituality, even though Gounod and Faure in particular are better known these days for their secular music.
 
Faure’s sublime and enduringly popular In paradisium from his Requiem Op 48 stole the show at the conclusion, after which the solo baritone Philippe Estephe received generous applause alongside Le Concert Spirituel’s founder and conductor, Herve Niquet.
 
In truth, however, Estephe’s warm, emotional tones were unable to project strongly enough to combat the wintry air in such a large and reverberating ecclesiastical arena, and he found his voice occasionally subsumed by the accompaniment of the 17 singers and eight instrumentalists, not to mention the organ high up in the north transept.
 
Any minor shortcomings in that direction were, though, unable to impact on the enjoyment of an evening marshalled beautifully by the eccentric Niquet, who delivered a shivery speech of thanks at the end in a flamboyant frock coat that looked rather too thin for the ambient temperature.
 
Chilly it may have been, but what the evening lacked in degrees Celsius was more than made up for by the heat generated by Niquet and his charges.

For more information see: concertspirituel.com