Who needs the Oscars when you have Voces8

published online: 2/27/2012

British vocal group thrills Civic Music audience.

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By BOB SAAR
for The Hawk Eye

It made sense, after you thought about it: a Civic Music concert on Oscar night?

Of course: a British vocal group was in town. That explains why the Memorial Auditorium parking lot was full.

Vocal group? An understatement: Voces8 was stunning and easily better entertainment than watching skinny blondes do the red carpet parade in Hollywood.

Voces8 – “eight voices” – is a vocal octet from Great Britain, and last night at Burlington’s famed riverside concert venue they purred their way through two sets of jazz, pop and classical songs.

Voces8 has a blend rarely heard in the pristine pools of a capella music. It was like hearing a distillation of Burlington’s own Bel Canto Chorale, dozens of sweet instruments refined down to just a handful.

“Their harmonies were clean and precise,” former Bel Canto director Roger Hatteberg said. “Buoyant. They were buoyant.”

Indeed they were. The six men and two women demonstrated such precise intonation that at times they sounded like a church organ that could speak English, rather than humans.

The singers began by walking onstage one-by-one while scatting “Lady Madonna” and segued flawlessly into the Gershwin classic, “I Got Rhythm.”

They stood so far away from the two stage microphones that what the audience got – lucky non-Oscarfiles, they – was beautifully naked acoustic voices, unadorned, unfettered and un-processed by electronics.

Buoyant; yeah, they were that. Upliftingly so.

It’s a great concert when the platitude “best song” cannot be attached to anything.

Ah, but Voces8 did have some excellent items on its bill of fare last night, and here are a few highlights unheard by those who stayed home to gawk at their televisions:

“This Marriage” was written as a celebration for the royal wedding last spring. Contra tenor Chris Wardle said Voces8 did not perform at the wedding itself.

“We recorded it and sent it as a gift to William and Kate,” he said. The royal couple was pleased, too. BBC aired it on the day of the wedding.

A contra tenor, by the way, is a man singing alto and soprano lines; falsetto of course.

And note the group has their own stylist – notably British in that the men’s dark suits were paired with brown shoes – and the two women, including the provocatively named Emily Dickens, wore identical dresses sewn with two different fabrics.

Bass Dingle Yandell was quite adept at the “dow-dow-dow” upright bass imitation thing, but he also sings: Dingle’s vibrato on “Shenandoah” was a sweet surprise, and he drove the spiritual “Steal Away” with a huge voice.

A favorite was the Bach cantata “Der Geist hilft unsrer Schwachheit auf (The Spirit comes to our aid in our weakness),” which sounded like some Teutonic forebears came to the door to sing a Christmas carol 10 months early, looking like a squad of modern-day missionaries in vintage-era Beatles suits.

Buoyant, it was, even in the raw native language.

Tenor Charles McDougall introduced the song, saying he’d eaten an entire rack of barbecue at Big Muddy’s earlier that day.

“Those were the most succulent and tender ribs I’ve had in the U.S.” the Scotsman said.

The audience was asked to pick our favorite singer, and for us it’s a tossup between Dingle, Dickens and McDougall, who gets the nod because his hair looked like he’s just come off the river after a day of waterskiing.

Next up: the Red Army Chorus and Dance Ensemble on April 11.