Review: Haydn's Creation at the Tung Auditorium ****1/2

The Liverpool Mozart Orchestra set the bar high when it launched its 75^th anniversary year last November with its president Sir Simon Rattle on the podium.

Happily, it had another ace up its sleeve with which to bring the special season to a fitting close, and in jubilant fashion.

The orchestra has performed Haydn throughout its three-quarters-of-a-century of music making, principally the prolific Austrian’s symphonies, but also occasionally other pieces, like his oboe concerto which it presented in a 1952 concert in the Bluecoat Hall with soloist Adele Karp.

It’s also never lacked ambition, although even by the LMO’s standards, this Saturday night concert at the Tung Auditorium was on an unusually grand scale, with not only a trio of soloists but also a 70-strong chorus to give full voice to what many consider one of Haydn’s masterpiece works.

I understand this is only the second time in its history that the orchestra has performed The Creation, the last and only other occasion being in 1993 at – aptly - St Faith’s Church in Crosby.

Ironically, and rather like buses (although not on the evening 82 route this week!), you wait for one oratorio and then two come along together.

I can’t vouch for Mendelssohn’s turbulent Elijah which was being staged at Liverpool Cathedral at the same time, but there was certainly a buoyant, celebratory atmosphere in the Tung – a clever move to choose a work that is uplifting and joyous, and whose composer made the conscious decision to curtail his story before the Book of Genesis – on which its text is based – got to the serpent, apple and a sorry end to the Garden of Eden idyll.

Of course, The Creation opens with dissonance as the orchestra becomes the overture's titular 'Representation of Chaos' - actually the piece Rattle conducted back in November. Scored dissonance aside, I’d have liked the strings to have found a warmer and more resonant tone early on.

But that was a quibble in an evening that was awash with musical colour and vibrancy, and coming from every section of the orchestra – the winds having a notably fine evening fluting like birds and roaring like lions, while principal cellist Jonny Stone had a busy one performing a series of secco recitatives (introducing the solo voices) which were specially composed by LMO conductor Robin Wallington.

Individually, Lucy Farrimond (Gabriel and Eve), Anthony Flaum (the Archangel Uriel) and particularly baritone Alistair Ollerenshaw, as Raphael and Adam, infused their storytelling with a dramatic vividness, while together they formed a pleasingly harmonious trio. A mention too for Isabel Ewart (apologies if I’ve spelled her name incorrectly) who joined them from the chorus in the final minutes to augment the ‘amens’.

The soloists were buoyed meanwhile by the massed ranks of that hugely impressive chorus of, in the main, young voices.

An augmented phalanx three rows deep in places ranged along the length of the space behind the orchestra, it encompassed three separate outfits – 40 members of the University of Liverpool Chamber Choir, 19 from Liverpool’s Oriel Singers and 11 choral scholars from the Vanderbilt University in Nashville on a very well timed annual visit to the city.

Three choirs, two countries but one bright and burnished aural sound as the story of the Creation, from God manifesting the heaven and earth to ‘man in his own image’, unfolded.

What was also cheering was to see a chorus engaged not only in what they were singing but also in understanding and projecting the resonance of its message. Let every voice sing unto the Lord indeed, and while being properly attentive to the conductor to boot!

Optimism and hope is always welcome, particularly at present, and this Creation certainly delivered that. Bravo.