Dance & Music Reviews : Consortium Angeli in Britten Premiere

The Altadena-based Consortium Angeli, a 50-member choir, and its orchestra performed a valuable service on Sunday with their presentation of the West Coast premiere of Britten’s “The Company of Heaven” at Hollywood United Methodist Church.

This 1937 work is a setting of texts by Milton, Hopkins, Christina Rossetti and the Bible with little obvious relationship to each other, out of which the resourceful composer fashioned a loose collection of stylistically varied musical vignettes.

The introduction, Britten’s response to the representation of chaos in Haydn’s “Creation,” is splendidly slithery, menacing stuff, here well-played by the string band.

After some ragged choral entrances earlier on, the Consortium redeemed itself in the Vaughan Williams-like folksiness of “Christ, the fair glory” and with “The War in Heaven,” a chilling foretaste of Britten’s “War Requiem.”

Special praise to Olwen Brown for her clear, liltingly intoned narrations and to soprano Denise Sonke for her limpidly floated solos.

The remainder of the program was devoted to Rossini’s mighty, daunting “Stabat Mater.”

Conductor-chorusmaster Eli Saenz may at times have erred on the side of restraint but, a few glitches aside, he, his singers and the orchestra (another half-dozen strings would have worked wonders) projected a goodly measure of the Rossinian fire and theatricality, notably in “Inflammatus” and the fugal finale.

Among the soloists, genuine thrills were provided by the big, piercing, unruly soprano of Jennifer Roderer while John Klacka offered homelier pleasures with his light, sweet tenor.