Music / “Jubilate Deo”, Canberra Community Chorale & Kompactus Youth Choir. At Wesley Uniting Church, November 6. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

IT was a full house at Wesley for this very fine concert on Sunday afternoon. It was a joint effort between the Canberra Community Chorale and Kompactus Youth Choir, with a seven-piece chamber ensemble providing the accompaniment.

The Chorale is a non-auditioned choir of around 40 voices under the direction of Dan Walker and Kompactus is described as a “youth chamber choir” for singers between 18 and 30, under the direction of Olivia Swift. They are a skilled vocal ensemble who blend well and provided some admirable solo moments through the concert.

The concert opened with the choirs entering in processional through the main doors singing  a Jubilate Deo by early 17^th century composer Michael Praetorius with the Chorale members heading to the choir stalls leaving the Kompactus singers on the stage for a choral arrangement of “Underneath the Stars”, a song by English folk singer Kate Rusby, with a solo by Henry Zovaro.

While Dan Walker introduced the major work of the program, “Jubilate Deo” by American composer Dan Forrest, the Chorale rearranged themselves behind the Kompactus members. Forrest’s “Jubilate Deo” is a suite of seven songs with the texts taken from “Psalm 100” and sung variously in Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, Mandarin Chinese, Zulu, Spanish and English. The seven sections are all attractive works, each with a quite different feel.

The first hints at being a before-the-interval choral number of a Broadway show, set to a Renaissance dance rhythm. The second song (in both Hebrew and Arabic) has a melody suggesting Middle-Eastern influences, with fine solos from alto Isobel Yeaman and soprano Freya Henfrey. Soprano Rene Li soloed in the next section sung in Mandarin,  which featured some very pretty arrangements for both the instrumentalists and the voices.

The fourth section was in Zulu and needed a little more precision in the phrasing to fully drive the rhythm along with the fifth song in Spanish featuring  soprano Caitlin Pilbeam who confidently soared above the combined choirs. The penultimate “Alleuia” began with Kompactus sitting down in the front and just the Chorale singing. The song built intensity throughout with percussion and some big organ chords leading to the Kompactus members sequentially standing, in a clever theatrical touch, before segueing into the final song of the suite, which featured big long chords from the singers, busy arpeggios from the instrumentalists and prog-rock chords from Peter Young at the Wesley organ.

I remain a little puzzled that a choir of 20-somethings describes themselves as a “youth” choir when such a description does suggest a membership of adolescents and why would you name a choir after moveable document storage?