Sunday 11 May 2014

Evening of Modern Choral Gems

Last night I attended the final concert of the 20th Anniversary Season of the Burlington Civic Chorale in Burlington, Ontario, a suburban city west of Toronto.  This is a small group of some 30 singers, but the quality of the music-making and the tone and blend were certainly worthy of larger and much longer-lived ensembles such as the ones I heard last week! The choir was skilfully led by Dr. Gary Fisher, and ably accompanied from piano or organ by Jennifer Goodine.


The entire program consisted of music written in the 20th century by three Americans and one British composer.  Lest this sound too daunting, please be assured that all the music was both singable and enjoyable -- although certainly not without challenges for both singers and audience!


The first half of the program was devoted to music of Leonard Bernstein.  The opening selection, entitled A Choral Quilt, was stitched together from 6 different Bernstein numbers by Jack Gottlieb.  I am not, incidentally, just punning by using the words "stitched together" since Gottlieb composed interludes that link the six numbers into a single continuous movement.  Only one of the six could be considered well-known, the penultimate Somewhere from West Side Story.  The cycle concludes with the chorale Almighty Father from Bernstein's Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Dancers and Players.  Here, the choir coped well with the strange yet enticing sequence of odd melodic intervals and odder chords, bringing this first work to a moving conclusion.


The rest of the first half was devoted to Bernstein's best-known and most-performed work for choir, the Chichester Psalms of 1965.  This was composed on a commission for a cathedral music festival in England, but Bernstein deliberately set the music to texts of the Psalms in Hebrew, and explicitly forbade performance in any other language.  He also created a solo part for a boy soprano, with a male counter-tenor as the only acceptable alternative.  The Civic Chorale performed this work in the composer's reduced version for organ, harp, and percussion.


The first movement opens with a dissonant chordal introduction that leads into a vigorous dancing movement in 7/4 time, a favourite time signature of Bernstein's.  Indeed, the number 7 figures in much of the music, both as to the time and with the fiendish parallel 7th intervals separating the tenor and bass lines.  This sounds unlovely, but in a good performance such as this the music has a swing and energy that carry all before it.


The second movement opens with a lovely lyrical solo for counter-tenor (sung here, in an amazing display of virtuosity, by conductor Gary Fisher in a fine counter-tenor voice).  This setting of the 23rd Psalm is taken up by the women, but they are soon interrupted by the basses and tenors singing in jagged cross-rhythms the words of Psalm 2 ("Why do the nations rage?").  These two quite opposite musical materials then continue in counterpoint to each other, a passage of utmost difficulty which the singers and musicians carried off with aplomb, most successfully.  The movement ends with a short recapitulation of the solo and a final reminiscence of the raging music from organ.


The final movement again opens with discordant sounds from the organist, but then settles into a gently flowing 10/4 time for the setting of Psalm 131.  This music perfectly captures the chastened spirit of the text and is a time of quiet beauty and reflection after the storm and stress of what has gone before it.  The final quiet chanting of a verse from Psalm 133 becomes a benediction upon the performers and audience alike, with a strong family resemblance (first cousin, perhaps) to the chorale from Mass which we heard earlier.  The choir maintained perfect balance and clarity through the long-held quiet notes, especially the sustained final Amen.


After the intermission, we heard a selection of poems from A. E. Housman's cycle A Shropshire Lad, set to music by James Mulholland in 1985.  Were it not for the date in the program, I might easily have imagined that this music was written just before World War One when the poems were first published -- and in Britain, not the United States.  The melodies had a folk-like quality that fit in exactly with the renaissance of English folk music in that period, led by such well-known composers as Holst and Vaughan Williams.  This was obviously a point of relaxation for the choristers, as compared to the two major works of the program, but was less rewarding musically for me.  Indeed, I felt that the jiggy 6/8 setting of the fourth poem, "In summertime on Bredon", did not accord at all with the text, although admittedly the music did slow and drop into the minor key at the penultimate verses describing the young woman's funeral.


The program ended with the Gloria by John Rutter, a major concert work from a contemporary composer known world-wide for his tuneful and vigorous short anthems and carols for church use.  This work in three main movements certainly had moments of traditional Rutter sound, but took the style to the next level altogether in the vicious stabbing rhythms of the final section particularly.  Once again, the singers and orchestra mastered the complexities of the work, although there was one moment when I felt as if the organist and choir had gotten away from each other.  Since the piece isn't familiar to me, it was hard to be sure.  What was certain was that this major work, combined with the Chichester Psalms, represented a major challenge to the musicians -- a challenge that they successfully surmounted.


Definitely a rewarding evening of music-making!

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