Monumental jazz mass (From This Is Wiltshire)

Monumental jazz mass

12:01pm Monday 6th July 2009

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It’s inevitable, emotionally, I suppose that most of the attention would focus on the first half of this programme because of the appearance of the Junior Choir but, musically and significantly, the second half, featuring Will Todd’s Mass in Blue, was monumental.

The Junior Choir, conducted by the ebullient Simon Carr Minns, certainly sang and moved enthusiastically but as they develop, as they surely will, they do need to look at their tone and musical discipline.

And so to Mass in Blue: A major work blending driving jazz and the Latin Mass with Todd himself on piano, his wife, Bethany Halliday, as jazz soprano soloist and Todd’s jazz trio colleagues of Gareth Huw Davies dazzling on double bass and percussionist Jim Fleeman. But who to conduct? None other than Nigel Perrin, doyen of musicologists whose talents seem to know no bounds.

His conducting was fluid, masterful, concise and, for his large choir, so clear. The chemistry between Perrin and percussionist Fleeman, with some quite violent changes in tempii, was almost the bedrock for what is a quite brilliant piece of music, allowing scope for Todd’s prodigious gift of improvisation.

If jazz can ever be disciplined then this was out of the textbook. Yet the sense of freedom, the power of devotion, were paramount.

Maybe, just to bring things down to earth, a little more attention to diction, tellingly at the final syllable, would have crowned a towering performance.

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