Once something of a cult figure, the American counter-tenor David Daniels now seems to be resting on his laurels a bit. In the mid-1990s, he was one of a handful of artists responsible for revising our ideas about the counter-tenor voice, robbing it of its primary association with churchiness and redefining it in terms of pagan, androgynous beauty. This disappointing concert with the Canadian orchestra Les Violons du Roi revealed that the beauty remains intact, but that Daniels's communicative powers are less in evidence.
Vivaldi's Stabat Mater and Bach's Ich Habe Genug were his main offerings. He was rather better in the Stabat Mater, though the piece itself is no masterpiece. Vivaldi only strikes form two-thirds of the way through, when the familiar text reaches the vision of the Virgin Mary as "the fountain of love" and the singer's voice is stilled in rapt contemplation as the strings seem to spatter the air with beatific droplets. Daniels's sweet, slightly feminine tone suited Vivaldi's elision of vocal sensuality with spiritual experience, though more than once you could not help noticing an absence of power and too few variations in colour or expressive range.
Ich Habe Genug, however, proved deeply problematic. The cantata, one of Bach's finest, plunges into extreme territory, where Daniels seemed either unable or unwilling to go. The subject is exhaustion with individual suffering and the soul's desire for release in death. It should be harrowing - yet Daniels distanced himself from the work, rarely conveying any involvement with the text. His voice flowed through it with a certain monochrome splendour, though some of it, notably the central aria Schlummert Ein, takes him into his lowest registers where the sound is least interesting. We didn't hear the best of him, in fact, until he got to his single encore - O Lord, Whose Mercies Numberless from Handel's Saul - in which his voice floated and dipped in rapture. The effect was breathtaking. Yet this was too little, too late.
Daniels gave us only half an evening's worth of music, leaving Les Violons du Roi and their balletic conductor Bernard Labadie to their own devices much of the time. Using conventional instruments with period technique, they played Bach's First Suite and Handel's B Flat Concerto Grosso with the combination of beauty and blandness that characterised the concert as a whole.
