Calmus Ensemble

Coach House, Dublin Castle

If you get a chance to hear the Calmus Ensemble over the coming week, don’t miss it. This excellent, five-voice group of singers from Germany, four men and one woman, have just started a nine-venue Music Network tour.

Their programme ranges from a crazy narrative song from early 16th-century Spain, through sacred choruses by Bach and part-songs by Brahms and Stanford, to a recent work commissioned by the ensemble. Everything is arranged in well-ordered groups. But above all there are the lively personalities of the singers, whose dashes of humour are all the more effective for being coupled with top-level technical skills and musicianship.

They started with three Bach choruses, including the fugue that concludes the motet Singet dem Herrn. This piece's compositional virtuosity is complemented by its demands on the the singers; and especially when sung one-to-a- part as on this occasion, there is nowhere to hide. Yet they could also show virtuosity of a much more subtle kind.

In Stanford's The Bluebird, impeccable tuning of chromatic and dissonant harmony from the men was contrasted by the soprano line – a thread floating. What restraint! In Hush, no More, from The Fairy Queen, diction and tuning were ideal, and timing of the silences that Purcell wrote into this piece was perfect. So was the performance of Lob den Heern, meine Seele!, which was commissioned by the ensemble from Wolfram Buchenberg (born 1962). A fascinatingly rich piece, it combines intellectual rigour with a distinctively modern idiom that somehow seems closer to Baroque-style objective representation than to Romantic concepts of expression.

The concert ended with the ensemble's arrangements of three Irish folk songs. In Finnegans Wakethe range of reference to other music was so intelligent and witty. It was a hoot.

Tours until next Thursday