Anyone who cares to follow such things will probably expect, when they see my name attached to a concert report, that they will hear not a single negative word about the performance.  And indeed you can count on that again here.  Since I am not a professional in the field, I have the luxury to approach these reports however I want.  Any critic worth his weekly column in a metropolitan newspaper will attend such a concert as it was my privilege to attend last weekend and compare it to some mental image of what a perfect instance of this concert would be.  I, on the other hand, will compare it to an empty hall, to no concert at all. Sadly, there have been concerts I have attended when I have wished for silence over what I was hearing, but I have no interest in reporting them.  The choirs might better suffer their shame in silence.      I was preoccupied with these thoughts of the nature of the critical endeavor as my wife and I drove into Boston last weekend.  I was raised in the Northeast and indeed attended college a mere hour from our destination.  I think I know something about that world, but many decades ago I adopted the American Midwest, and, in good Midwestern fashion, styled the critics of the Northeast as the most rapacious in the country.  Normally, I would chase these choirs to venues in Cincinnati and St Louis, but circumstances found us in Massachusetts at the same time that the Westminster Abbey Choir was to open its U.S. tour at Trinity Church in Boston's Back Bay.  It was my wife's idea to take in this new venue, and I approached the place ready to pick a fight with any Critic that crossed my path (as if I would know).                                     Trinity Church, Boston  We knew we were really in Boston when I had to pay $20 (a double sawbuck! my father would said in astonishment) to park for the afternoon.   The second clue was the length of the "few blocks" to Copley Square.  We knew we had arrived when despite it being an hour before concert time, lines were already getting long in front of a graceful, understated church in a city square, equally graceful and understated.  We hoped for quick escape from the brisk winds (doors were supposed to open an hour early), but that was delayed.  A cordial official announced from the top of the steps that the "boys were still rehearsing."  Hmmm.  O'Donnell was stealing a few extra moments to get his choir into maximum overdrive for what he could expect to be a formidable audience.  The American Guild of Organists sponsored the event in honor of their hundredth anniversary.  It is very likely that some of the most discriminating musical ears in the city would be here. While we waited, I heard more British accents than I would have found at a concert in the Midwest.  One of them, as a particularly assertive gust blew over us, suggested that those with a British passport might be granted ten paces forward in the line.  I was tempted to suggest that perhaps they should move to the back of the line since their opportunities to hear the choir were presumably more numerous, but that would have violated the tenets of Hoosier hospitality.    When we were finally allowed in, all of us jostling for advantage in a surprisingly disorderly queue, we found ourselves in a beautiful sanctuary, as graceful and understated as the exterior but sumptuously finished with every effort to make the sumptuousness as invisible as possible.  The architecture was more in the style of Wren than the builders of the Abbey, that is, more like the venue of the Abbey choir's crosstown competition in the City.  We were told that the church had recently undergone a facelift, the scaffolding only recently removed, and that the austere murals at the top of the sanctuary had not looked as good in living memory.                                  Trinity Church, Boston   The audience, like the church, were dressed in most understated fashion. There were the requisite suits and ties, but no show.  No gowns, no jewels.  Everyone seemed to be intent not to flaunt the extraordinariness of the occasion.  Although preparations for this event must have been extensive, the only indication that something out of the ordinary was about to happen was the music stand placed at the center. Although all ages were represented, there was the usual disturbingly large proportion of gray hair.  It seemed an absolutely full house. Even the desperate seats, with no view of the altar, were full, and there was not even a closed circuit television, which the Cathedral Basilica in St Louis provides for the view-challenged. The subtext for this event, for anyone who had followed the Westminster Abbey Choir, was, "What has O'Donnell accomplished?"  My wife and I had the chance to hear the Abbey choir in situ shortly after James O'Donnell had made a defection of Tudor proportions from the cathedral down the street.  No one questioned the brilliance of his work at Westminster Cathedral.  The question, when we heard his choir at the abbey a few years ago, was whether he would accomplish the same thing at the Abbey. Judging by his intensity at that time, we would not have doubted that O'Donnell intended to accomplish great things again.  The choir processed from the back of the church, a long space they would traverse four times before they were finished, eyes fixed straight ahead.  A proud, condemned man would walk to his execution in this way, but I suspect the direction for sternness was to was more to avoid nerves and lend dignity to the occasion.  They wore the red cassocks that I am told are the prerogative only of royal choirs.  They assembled in three (or was it four?) rows on the steps of the altar and began a program of huge and difficult music that would last for two hours.  The program began with Benjamin Britten's Te Deum in C, retreated four centuries to the Benedictus of Byrd's Great Service and leapt forward to even more contemporary works by Francis Grier and Philip Moore.  The choir's performance of the Kyrie and Glora of Grier's Missa Trinitatis sanctae was awesome.  No choral understatement here, just tears at the end, wiping of glasses, and instructions from the musician who shares my domestic hearth to get my hands on a recording of that piece.  I think she meant O'Donnell's recording of that piece, which, if it doesn't exist, needs to be made immediately.  O'Donnell places his senior choristers in the front line, with the juniors peeking out from the row behind.  The pieces allowed for much solo work so that we could hear the remarkable variety of voices that own pieces of the choral sound.  It's not the sound of Westminster Cathedral, I think, and I lack the musician's vocabulary to explain the difference.  If the Westminster Cathedral Choir were trumpets, the Abbey are French horns.  The soaring high notes seemed to grow out of nowhere, not delivered with a sting-a rounded more than a piercing sound, supple more than brittle. O'Donnell has either built or found a group that, man and boy, share his intensity, and the engagement of the entire choir in the musical work at hand was one of the things one can experience only when the music is real in front of you.  Like the other concerts I have attended, this program gave the singers a break midway through each half of the program while the organist went to work.  The Trinity Church organ is a glorious monster that mastered surround sound a century before it was even a gleam in Mr. Dolby's eyes. So hard to reign in, that a console organ had to stand in to accompany the choir on the more delicate pieces.  But Robert Quinney cut those reigns loose in Bach's Fantasia and Fugue in G minor and especially in the suitably bombastic "Orb and Sceptre" Coronation March of William Walton for which the organist showed off every stop and received a heartfelt "Bravo!" before the enthusiastic applause took over. Considering the number of organists that must have been in the audience, Quinney seems to have taken to the soloist's role happily and with no sense of intimidation. O'Donnell spoke to the audience early in the program and explained the Abbey connections in all the music they were doing.  I have heard other directors do this, and it is most fitting.  The pond is wide enough that it can be difficult for an American to understand the personalities of the British choirs as the natives do.  O'Donnell did not want his colonial revolutionaries to go away without being reminded that the Abbey is the place for coronations.  The second half of the concert, which began with the quiet intimacy of Purcell's "Funeral Sentences for Queen Mary," ended with coronation works by Byrd and Howells and closed, as it opened, with a huge song of praise, William Walton's Coronation Te Deum.  I was interested in how a most particular Boston audience would react after such a performance.  My wife complains that we see too many undeserved standing ovations in the Midwest, and she's probably right. I did not expect a standing ovation here even though my knees were itching to make that move, but in fact the standing ovation was almost immediate.  We were given one encore, Vaughan William's "O Taste and See," with a lovely treble solo.  But recognizing the workout the choir had just completed, O'Donnell did not undertake additional encores, but directed his troops back down the central aisle (this time, though, they were smiling and taking odd glances at the audience) to a second standing ovation.  I am left wondering whether Boston audiences had become sentimental and are not nearly so critical as I imagine big city audiences to be or whether the performance was indeed that good.  Let's settle here on the latter: Westminster Abbey Choir delivered a powerful, harrowing, and brilliant performance on Sunday last.  Their tour of the U.S. continues.  Now back in the Midwest, I am acutely conscious that they will be performing only four and a half hours away on Friday, and only three hours away next Monday.  They seem to have at least three variations of programs.  And gas prices have fallen a bit in the last week or so.   Lynn Schoch Bloomington, Indiana                                                 UK Cathedral Music Links. 2005