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The Great Service
30.04.2008“Hillier blends soberness with dulcet polyphony”, was the headline in Trouw newspaper last week following one of the successful concerts given by the Nederlands Kamerkoor under the renowned conductor Paul Hillier. The audiences in Leeuwarden, Amersfoort, Arnhem, The Hague, Amsterdam and Groningen all reacted with great enthusiasm to William Byrd’s The Great Service, which was interspersed with contemporary works by David Lang, Jack Body, Howard Skempton and Gavin Bryars.
Trouw’s music critic Anthony Fiumara was no less glowing about the piece by Pulitzer prize-winner David Lang: “The short piece again (after ecclesiastes) […] was breathtaking by its very straightforwardness: a simply repeated little motif in the lower voices and a song melody above that, to illustrate the text which is about the eternal cycle of things. Wonderful how the Kamerkoor managed to extract the maximum out of such a limited range.” The Friesch Dagblad was particularly taken with the different sections of Byrd’s impressive The Great Service: “The music was performed with a particularly lovely, straight and yet very suggestive sound, suiting Hillier’s style and conducted with suppleness by him.” In other words: the Nederlands Kamerkoor in top form!
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