Pure Sound Please

This last weekend we attended a concert entitled Lenten Reflection at Vancouver’s Catholic Holy Rosary Cathedral featuring the Belle Voci vocal group and the Cantare Super Orchestram early-music band. The music was fine and it was the most beautiful sound I’ve heard in a long time. Twenty-two months, to be precise (see below). And so I get to report on good music and yell at production people.

A cathedral is a nice place for a concert!

The concert opened with just the singers, their voices drifting down from a high place behind us, a balcony or choir loft. There was no incremental accompaniment and no amplification; the music flowed from vocal cords to eardrums — not directly, of course, there was lots of reflection and reverberation introduced by the Cathedral space. The singers were polished and expressive and the sound, drifting through the vast space, beyond exquisite.

They sang a lovely piece Byrd (1539-1623). Then the instrumentalists played a number by von Biber (1644-1704) while the singers snuck downstairs. Joined, they performed Bach’s BWV 229 and 150, then pieces by Pergolesi (1710-1736) and Steffani (1654-1728).

The Bach pieces, as usual, had more music in the music, but the others were also fun. It was a small ensemble: In the choir, five sopranos, six altos, four each tenors and basses. The band had five baroque violins, a baroque viola, a baroque cello, a violone (think, string bass with frets), a baroque bassoon, and a player doubling on harpsichord and organ. Thus, an ensemble quite likely not too much bigger or smaller than the ones playing this music in the 1700s, when it was new.

That sound · Once again, the sound was something special and yeah, the musicians were excellent, but for me, the key thing was the lack of amplification: vocal cord to eardrum via cathedral. It’s always seemed obvious to me that you can’t run music through a bunch of electronics and speaker mechanics without changing it; if only spatially, with the sounds coming from speaker diaphragms located somewhere away from the human musician. To my ears, there is a fragile magic in pure unamplified sound. I lack the words to describe the difference but it’s not subtle.

Does this mean that everything was perfect? No; the choir was a little bit male-heavy; some of the soprano and especially alto lines were part-hidden behind the massed male voices. Also, the bassoon was right at the front of the stage; While the playing was fine, it felt as though it were musically, not just physically “in front of” the band and singers.

Both of these could have been fixed, by telling the men to take it down a notch or having one or two fewer of them. And by moving the bassoon back to the usual woodwinds spot behind the strings. Still, these were very minor imperfections.

Oh, and the performance and sound of the bass line on that violone was absolutely awesome; clearly audible as a thing on its own while it wove all the other musical threads together.

I’ve discovered that few classical musicians share my passion for unamplification. I hear things like “I want a full sound or “The soloists need to cut through the orchestra.” Which, well, OK, but somehow people managed to accomplish those things for centuries, before amplifiers and speakers were invented.

22 months? · That’s since May of 2024 when I took in the Tedeschi-Trucks Band, whose music couldn’t be more different from anything called “Lenten Reflections”: electric not acoustic, profane not sacred. But crystal clear and perfectly balanced sound; so much better than most electric bands achieve.

My sincere thanks to the musicians and their leaders for a lovely experience. And my message to everyone co-ordinating and leading live music performances: Of course the first priority has to be the quality of the music, but think about the sound and try to be better. Better than than most performances manage, these days.

We know it’s possible.