Concerts in St Paul’s Cathedral, especially large-scale choral concerts of the kind that the London Symphony Orchestra and its chorus give there regularly as their contribution to the City of London festival, are inevitably triumphs of hope over experience. Few performances survive immersion in that exuberantly resonant space, in which only the largest-scale gestures retain their integrity (Berlioz’s Requiem sounded magnificent there a few years ago) and fine detail just evaporates into the cathedral’s vast dome.
What hope then for The Creation, which the LSO brought to this year’s festival conducted by Edward Gardner? Haydn’s best-known oratorio, sung here using the original English version of the text, may be full of pictorial moments, but few of them are big and bold enough to cut through the acoustic haze of St Paul’s. The one that is, the representation of chaos in the prelude, and the arrival of light in a fortissimo shaft of choral C major, sounded suitably imposing, and Gardner and his forces delivered it impeccably, but after that too much was rendered approximate or blurred.
Most of the time the soloists – soprano Sarah Tynan, tenor Robert Murray and bass Neal Davies – had the best of it, but Davies unwittingly revealed the treacherous impossibility of the acoustics when, after moving less than three yards to his left for the third part of the work, his previously immaculate diction became almost impossible to follow.
Behind the trio woodwind solos had a habit of escaping from the orchestra and floating off into the distance, as the clarinet did during Tynan’s aria describing the creation of birds at the beginning of the second part. But at least the chorus, combined with Gardner’s generally lively approach, gave the performance a sense of unstuffy vitality. There was nothing too churchy or pious about any of it, and that, in such a setting, was quite an achievement.
