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"DAVID HILL's ten-year sojourn as Director of Music at Winchester has been a catalogue of excellence. Shortly he leaves to succeed Christopher Robinson at St John's College, Cambridge. His farewell concert with the Waynflete Singers, which was followed by another a week later with the cathedral choir, was a good example of his work.

The Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, old friends and allies of both Winchester's flourishing five- year-old festival and of Hill and his several choirs, excelled themselves; and the chorus gave their all.

Hill has nursed and cajoled his Winchester chorus to the same inspired artistry and commitment that he has instilled in his boys, and, in recent years, girls. The chorus's singing throughout Kodály's Psalmus Hungaricus and Berlioz's Te Deum was of the highest order.

The quality could be felt in the first blast and unison descending phrases of "When as King David sore was afflicted" (even in Edward J. Dent's translation of the text, a 16th-century Hungarian paraphrase of Psalm 55 by Mihály Vég); in the chorus words "Nightly and daily", attended by deep, muttering woodwind; or in the chorus's massive, almost Elgarian surge (under Bonaventura Bottone's tenor solo) "Mischief and malice. . !"

So, too, at the opposite end of the scale, there was wonderfully clear word-delivery from Bottone - who has one of the most sympathetic operatic voices to be heard today - with pianissimo double basses, then woodwind and brass, at David's words: "I could have borne so sore an affliction"; or where he is joined by clarinets ("I could have hidden myself") and then horns ("But it was thou, my friend, whom I trusted"); and where Hill's polished Waynflete Singers shadow the tenor ("Evening and morning and at the noonday").

Kodály's interlude for harp, clarinet, flute, and solo violin, preceding "So in Jehovah will I put my trust", was bewitching. The lower voices' launch into "As for the righteous", and the unison sopranos' and basses' delivery of the soft final recapitulation of the start (plus tenors quietly extending the last line) caught the atmosphere of this Magyar masterpiece gloriously.

The chorus had fire in its belly for the Berlioz, too. Curiously, after the Kodály, this impressive outpouring of the mature Berlioz (composed in 1849) sounded more banal and bombastic than usual - more like his early student Mass, composed when he was 22.

There are foreshadowings of Liszt's Christus; and Brucknerian space in the "Sanctus Deus Sabaoth", heralded by the basses' thrusting "Pleni sunt coeli" and oboes' doubling of the voices at "Paracletum Spiritum"."Tu, Christe, tu Rex gloriae" ("Thou art the King of Glory, O Christ"), possibly because of the acoustic demands of its original context, remained somehow harmonically rooted to the ground; by contrast, Hill's excitable, jogging pace at "Te ergo quaesumus", with tenor solo added, seemed to be judged to perfection.

Best of all was the a cappella "Fiat super nos misericordia" ("Let thy mercy, O Lord, lighten upon us") with its hint of Berlioz's L'Enfance du Christ. This was wonderful singing, gratefully received."

This web site updated 15 November 2002

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