A concert can be internally coherent, elegant even – yet dramatically inert. Devotion was exactly this kind of paradox.

Chorus master Hugh Lydon built his program around four textual pairings – Mawby/Byrd, Victoria/Lauridsen, Duruflé/Gjeilo, Schubert/Mendelssohn – flanking Duruflé’s organ Choral varié sur le “Veni Creator” at the centre, Holly Broadbent at the organ console, tenor Matthew Reardon soloing in the Schubert and Mendelssohn.

As Lydon’s own note had it, the aim was to show how “two different composers can look at the exact same passage of text from completely different angles, yet both create music that is emotionally rich and meaningful.”

It’s a sound premise. But Lydon’s spoken introductions before pairings, and the applause permitted between every item rather than between each pair, had the effect of breaking the program into eight isolated recital slots rather than four continuous acts of comparison.

Furthermore, the pairs themselves followed no liturgical or dramaturgical logic: Passion (Mawby/Byrd) to Nativity (Victoria/Lauridsen) to Pentecost (the Duruflé organ work) to Maundy Thursday (Duruflé/Gjeilo) to Annunciation (Schubert/Mendelssohn) is the Christian year run backwards, forwards, then backwards again.

Given Lydon’s emphasis on the centrality of text and meaning in sung music, a sequence following the actual liturgical calendar – Annunciation, Nativity, Maundy Thursday, Passion, Pentecost – would have let the program build rather than merely alternate, ending, rather than bisecting, on the Duruflé as Paschal culmination.

One must however be pragmatic. At lease applause and spoken commentary allow voices to rest, albeit at the expense of momentum.

Such logic was also apparent in the singing itself, with Mawby’s chordal, immediately grateful Ave verum opening proceedings and displaying the choir against St Mary’s gloriously accommodating acoustic before the more challenging repertoire arrived.

The WASO Chorus in St Mary’s Cathedral, Perth. Photo supplied

Byrd’s setting of the same text, sung with real dynamic sensitivity, still felt slightly jarring. Yes, one hears it sung in big choral and cathedral contexts all the time. But this is recusant chamber music, written for a handful of voices in a private chapel evading pursuivants, not a nave built for public splendour. How marvellous it would have been for a small group of soloists to break away from the main choir and bring those further layers of meaning to text and music.

Victoria’s O magnum mysterium turned occasionally muddy in its dense polyphony but retained its Iberian majesty; Lauridsen’s companion setting, by contrast, glowed – the block harmonies resonant, loosening into contrapuntal strands for an exquisite closing Alleluia.

Broadbent’s Duruflé was the afternoon’s structural hinge in every sense: Lydon himself intoning the plainchant between variations, a lyrical device tying organ back to voice, before a genuinely dramatic closing fugue – a real elbow of the program, the point where instrumental and vocal worlds met. Duruflé’s own Ubi caritas, sung straight after, felt all the lovelier for the choir’s absence preceding it; Gjeilo’s freely composed companion returned to a different, more saturated homophonic richness.

Schubert’s Ave Maria, here for organ and tenor, lost the intimacy a salon reading with piano would supply – an odd echo, unintentional or not, of the Byrd’s own displacement from small room to cathedral nave. Mendelssohn’s antiphonal Ave Maria, double chorus and organ in full cry, closed the printed order as a genuine climax, Reardon’s ringing tenor riding the massed forces like a mystical surfer in a mini-oratorio.

It’s easy to imagine why Lydon chose this shape: a volunteer community choir – even one as superb as the WASO Chorus – manages unaccompanied demands better with fresh voices, and a central organ interlude offers real vocal rest. But again: if text and meaning are so important, then surely a program that offered more context, more narrative drive, would quite literally have made more sense?

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