Vienna Boys Choir falls a bit flat in Hill Auditorium show

Vienna Boys Choir publicity photo

Would double the number of boys have made a difference? Would it have helped if the disjunction between the conductor’s style and the choristers’ style had been less marked?

I’m home again Sunday night after a concert at Hill Auditorium by the world-famous Vienna Boys Choir, conducted by Manolo Cagnin, puzzling over what made so much of this University Musical Society concert, a highly anticipated overture to the Christmas music season, seem somewhat flat and less than inspirational. And so short on the soaring purity of boys’ voices that I, and many others, came to hear.

Granted, there was more of that angelic beauty of sound in the second half of the choir’s “Christmas in Vienna,” which was devoted to songs of Christmas, sacred and secular. But the first half, a genre-crossing mix of choral and solo pieces from around the globe and across the centuries, was shorter on good singing and inspiration. It was also, in the inclusion of a happy-faced, decontextualized “If I Were a Rich Man,” from “Fiddler on the Roof,” ironically short on a sense of taste and history.

But “Fiddler” is a quibble. The bigger concern has to be with the concert as a show and with the singing itself. To start with the singing, let’s entertain the possibility that 24 young voices, voices that are trained but cannot be pushed, are just not enough to fill a Hill Auditorium, glorious though its acoustics may be. Maybe two choirs’ worth of boys could have done it (the Vienna Boys Choir divides into four groups to tour). At times Cagnin, accompanying the boys at the piano, overwhelmed them. But at others, it was just hard to hear them, especially at their entrances.

I think there was also a vagueness and uncertainty about those entrances — which Cagnin might have helped with better direction — just as there was, on too many occasions, uncertainty about pitch. And rare were the times, in the first half of the show, when the music-making was not four-square but forward-moving. Best were the excerpts from Verdi’s “Four Sacred Pieces,” with affecting shifts in dynamics; and FaurÃ©’s “Cantique de Jean Racine,” with its pungent dissonances.

Like lighting in a play, all these details make a difference in how music moves us, or fails to. So does spirit, and that’s where the dichotomy between the boys’ demeanor and Cagnin’s came into play.

On stage in their sailor uniforms, the boys, 10 to 14, are all spit and polish — and reserve. On Sunday, that reserve almost seemed a lack of engagement. Did Cagnin feel some need to make up for that? In any case, making his first appearance here with the choir, Cagnin seemed like he was from another movie altogether — effusive in his gestures and speech, over the top as a master of ceremonies, drawing attention to himself (and away from the boys) with some clowning. He acknowledged the boys repeatedly, but his smiling, puppeteer-ish manner (OK, come forward, now take another bow, no, really, it’s OK, now go back) seemed somehow condescending, though I’m sure it wasn’t meant to be.

Cagnin indulged less in grand gestures in the program's second half; that, coupled with singing that was more energized and true, let the music take primacy of place. A sublime “Adeste Fidelis,” sung as the boys filed in procession back onto the stage, led to a lovely succession of carols, and, showing themselves young masters of many styles, the boys charmed in a close-harmony arrangement of “I’ll Be Home for Christmas.”