Festival Music

Schola Cantorum de Venezuela

Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh

Keith Bruce

five stars

GIVEN that Venezuela’s El Sistema music education initiative has inspired a series of Scottish projects in areas of need – beginning with Stirling’s Big Noise Raploch in 2008 – not enough has been made of the presence at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival of Schola Cantorum de Venezuela under its artistic director Maria Guinand.

The vocal element of El Sistema, as a choir and a school, is approaching its 60th birthday and 71-year-old Guinand has led it for the last 40 of those. Although there were young faces among her 17-strong ensemble performing this morning recital, one of its most obvious distinguishing characteristics was the age range, suggesting that a few alumni had been scholars some years ago.

They were all, however, singing from the same hymn sheet – except that everything was from memory. The music was equally wide in range, with American Jake Runestad, Canadian R Murray Schafer and our own James MacMillan as well as composers from their homeland and elsewhere in Latin America, but the approach was consistent: committed, rhythmic and theatrical, with fabric of many colours employed as crucial props to the movement that accompanied the music.

For Guinand – as she made expressly clear – singing is a political activity, and the internationalism and ecumenism of the choir’s repertoire is as eloquent as their unique musicality. When MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn appeared half-way through the Christian music of this recital’s first half, it was the most melodic composition we had yet heard, but also completely re-cast in their mouths. Similarly, Runestad’s Alleluia, which ended the sequence, made that single word a statement of faith in a way akin to, but completely different from, Handel’s famous chorus.

To hear their Latin American repertoire was to understand with fresh ears the building blocks of Golijov’s La Pasión, for which they had combined with the National Youth Choir of Scotland to open the 2024 Festival on Saturday.

From Alberto Grau’s take on the Lamentations of Jeremiah before the interval, with its squeals, claps and glissandos, through to the seamless transition from pop folk tunes to ritual chant at the heart of part two – with Schafer’s sharply political Magic Songs the mischievous modern ingredient – two hours in the company of Venezuela’s Schola Cantorum was an utterly joyous education.