Singing Ravel: choral wizardry from Les Métaboles at Promenades musicales du Pays d’Auge

For the final concert of my summer “Tour de Gaule”, something completely different. I’ve wanted to see chamber choir Les Métaboles since 2020, when they made a wonderful contribution to Bachtrack’s “Christmas with a Carol” appeal, so when they turned out to be performing at the Promenades musicales du Pays d’Auge, a stone’s throw from my route home, I jumped at the chance. Still, the programme raised eyebrows. A whole concert of Ravel? His total choral output consists of a single set of Trois Chansons pour chœur a cappella, so everything else was going to be arrangements of instrumental music or pieces for one voice. Several people I met on my travels were sceptical, to say the least.

To create the programme, director Léo Warynski drew on a variety of settings of French poetry to Ravel’s music done by composers over the years, bookending the concert with transcriptions of two of his greatest hits, newly commissioned from composer Thibault Perrine: a setting of 16th-century words by Jehan Tabourot to the music of Pavane pour une infante défunte and a wordless vocalise of Boléro. These two were the unquestioned highlights of the evening.

The Pavane opened the concert in spectacularly blissful fashion. Since the piece is the evocation of Renaissance nostalgia, performing it in the style of Renaissance polyphony works to perfection, especially in the high-ceilinged, resonant space of the gothic Église Abbatiale – a church crazily oversized, to our modern eyes, for the village of 3,000 souls that is Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives. As the 24 singers of Les Métaboles built up the complex layering, the entry of each voice was telling as well as contributing to the mass of sound. The poetry was intelligible, there was great textural variety, individual voices rang beautifully at all ends of the register without any one being overdone, all evoking the ancient style... a magical performance that I didn’t want to end.

The closing Boléro was a tour de force, which Les Métaboles clearly adore doing, if the broad grins on the singers’ faces were anything to go by. It begins with hums for the voiced instruments and a beatboxed dum-ts-ts-ts-tchk for the famous repeated snare drum, after which oohs, aahs and all manner of other syllables gradually join in, Middle Eastern-style vocal arabesques lighting up the 15 minute crescendo as it works its way through to the final enormous fortissimo, with one of the singers clapping his hands high above his head with a “tshhhhh” to mimic crash cymbals. It was all masses of fun as well as an extraordinary demonstration of vocal control; apart from anything else, anyone who can beatbox 338 bars of perfectly even snare drum crescendo deserves some kind of medal. OK, it wasn’t 100% vocal – they cheated at the end by adding foot-stamping and a bit of body percussion, but let’s not cavil.

In between those two magnificent performances, the remainder of the material was less successful. The sound was gorgeous throughout, but the problem was that in a large resonant space, the only way of making poetry intelligible is to sing it slowly, so the succession of slow, wistful numbers began to drag. The fast, folk numbers (Nicolette and Ronde from the Trois Chansons) added energy, but the words were lost. There were plenty of highlights – some superb bass singing from René Ramos-Premier, an exceptional soprano solo by Anne-Claire Baconnais in La Flûte enchantée from Shéhérazade, crunchy harmonies in Ronsard à son âme.

Still, the Pavane and Boléro will stay long in the memory. Les Métaboles are a choir to be excited by.

David's accommodation in Normandy was funded by Les Promenades musicales du Pays d'Auge.