Music /  “Midsummer”, The Oriana Chorale. At Yhuuramulum (Canberra Girls Grammar School Lakeside facility), December 10. Reviewed by GRAHAM MCDONALD.

FORSAKING the common habit of local musical ensembles to focus on Christmas music at this time of the year, the Oriana Chorale under director Dan Walker chose a concert program themed around midsummer as their final offering this year.

It was a diverse mix of very old and much newer music, grouped into three blocks with the first more modern interpretations of the idea of midsummer as a time of relaxation, the second loosely based around Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and the third section of songs about marriage. The venue was a large open space on the water’s edge in Yarralumla, with windows overlooking the water, part rowing shed and part teaching facility.

The concert opened with a chant in honour of St John the Baptist written a 1000 years ago followed by the setting of a Michael Leunig poem by NZ-born composer Clare Maclean. These were followed by two wordless songs by early 20^th century English composer Frederick Delius, another contemporary work by Australian Iain Grandage and an arrangement by Walker of George Gershwin’s “Summertime”, which cleverly avoided all the usual choral cliches.

The second set of songs included “Lullaby” by Finnish composer Jaakko Mantyjarvi, which went in lots of unexpected directions with hints of jazz and folk harmonies. This preceded a setting of “Shall I Compare You to a Summer’s Day” from English composer John Rutter and a sprightly song by Ralph Vaughan Williams based, like “Lullaby”, on a fragment of text from “A Midsummer’s Night Dream.”

The final four songs continued in the same sort of varied combinations starting with a song by the 12^th century German Abbess Hildegard von Bingen and then a complex Finnish wedding song in the “yoik” style of songs of the far-northern Sami people. The choir then arranged themselves across the front and down the sides of the space for the final two songs, a very pretty piece called “The Wedding” by American composer Eric Whitacre and a song in a dance rhythm from Henry Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” with an instrumental break on massed kazoos in the middle.

This was a pleasant way to spend an hour on a late Saturday afternoon.