View from the Green Room: Madrigallery mixes the old and the new

It’s great to see and hear Madrigallery in full voice again. It’s a well-established choir of several decades that prides itself on complex arrangements from the Baroque era especially. 

The repertoire runs from early plainchant through madrigals and Baroque to works from modern composers, such as Rutter and Jenkins.

The choir was founded by their MD Kevin O’Carroll, who went on to conduct the group for many years. Kevin has stepped down from the role and Pauline Kennedy has the referee’s whistle and the conductor’s baton now. No better woman. 

Pauline is a music graduate of SETU, specialised in Early/Renaissance Music and has previously conducted the W.I.T. Madrigal Group, along with the Edmund Rice Choral Society and Ad Hoc Chorale.

She’s clearly keen to build on Madrigallery’s tradition of complex choral work and tonight’s programme is bang in the middle of the choir’s work. 

A Mendelssohn Verleih uns Frieden (Grant us peace) is a chorale cantata by Felix Mendelssohn that is particularly apt given the times we live in. It’s a prayer for peace by Martin Luther. 

Mendelssohn composed the short work in one movement for mixed choir and orchestra in 1831. As always with this Hamburg composer, the piece is tuneful with the melody moving in and out between the sections, with a warm and elegant choral swell. 

Debussy’s “Trois Chansons” is set to the medieval courtly-love poetry of Charles, Duke of Orléans (1394–1465), who was unlucky enough to be captured after the Battle of Agincourt and spent 25 years in an English medieval prison while waiting to be ransomed. The poem imagines France as a beautiful young woman and the song is reverent and platonic in nature.

John Rutter is a Madrigallery favourite and I’m glad to see his “As the bridegroom to his chosen” on the clár. It’s an extended conceit that compares Christ to a bridegroom through elegant similes… “As the light within the lantern/As the father in the home/So, Lord, art Thou to me.” 

Iowa-born (with Irish roots, of course) Elaine Hagenberg’s “O Love” is tonight’s stand-out item for me. Quiet, reverential, sincere and whispers “faith” through a sumptuous swelling melody that rises to a crescendo before segueing into an adorable whispered prayer.

The Fallaway House Ensemble is certainly a new departure for Madrigallery and their accompaniment in Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” and “Autumn Leaves” is a big crowd-pleaser with tonight’s audience. Soprano Caroline Reid-O’Brien also guests and sparkles with a considerable programme that runs from Wallace through Disney and right on to Abba.

Madrigallery’s final set is equally impressive. James Agee’s poem "Sure on this shining night” and set to music by Morten Lauridsen is an older man’s reflection on his life with an uplifting belief that, even through the darkest times in life, there is still kindness in the world. Norway’s Ola Gjeilo’s “Northern Lights” is a slow builder to a huge harmonic climax with a hypnotic finish before we’re all out the gap to the strains of “I’ll tell me ma”!

A jazz band… a Joni Mitchell classic… a Dubliners foot-tappin’ favourite. Changing times for Madrigallery.