Music / “Songs of Rosa Mystica”, The Song Company. At Gandel Hall, NGA, June 14. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

THE promotional material for this concert described it as “extreme singing” and much of the concert certainly seemed a technical challenge for the six singers of The Song Company.

The three featured works are full of dense, complex writing, often with the normal conventions of structure, rhythm and harmony forgotten or deliberately ignored in favour of sounds that, at times, were little more than a confused muddle.

The concert opened with a work commissioned by The Song Company for its tenth anniversary in 1994. Composed by Australian composer Elliott Gyger it sets three quite different texts into 20 minutes of performance. It occasionally coalesces into something where the six singers are all working with each other, but for most of the rest of the time the six parts seem to have little to do with each other. The work must be fiendishly difficult to perform, which might be one reason why this was only its second performance in nearly 30 years.

The middle section of the concert was a new work by guest director Jack Symonds bracketed by three charming songs by Benjamin Britten written in 1939 and another from his contemporary Michael Tippett from 1942.

The highlight of the concert was the final work by the recently deceased Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho where the singers used headset microphones and the sounds were played around with by sound designer Ben Carey in real time and played through speakers at the back of the hall facing towards the stage. The vocal sounds were turned into distorted chimes and rushing winds that cleverly sat behind what is some gorgeously scored vocal music without dominating or taking away from the voices.

As we have come to expect from The Song Company the singing was superb, but programming like this, which pushes the boundaries of listenable music, is not going to attract an audience, as a half-full Gandel Hall demonstrated.