I attended the October 17th
performance of the Vancouver Chamber Choir with great anticipation. The concert
was billed as “High Renaissance – The Golden Age of Choral Music”, with music
by, among others, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis and Palestrina, some of my
favourite composers from the period.
The concert opened with Byrd’s Sing joyfully to God, an anthem for the
publically sanctioned Anglican Church, and a setting of Ave verum corpus, written for services in the composer’s own
Catholic faith. The twenty-five voices of the Vancouver Chamber Choir were
joined in this work by FOCUS! Singers, made up of students from music schools throughout
the lower mainland.
William Byrd’s compositional genius
was so great that his Anglican masters (mostly) turned a blind eye to his
refusal to give up the Catholic faith. Because the work was written for clandestine
Catholic worship, I would venture a guess that Ave verum corpus was written for small performing forces, perhaps even
one singer per voice part. Nevertheless, it was a joy to hear both works,
diametrically opposite in atmosphere and feeling, performed with great
musicality by a full complement of voices.
Appropriately, the programme
continued with Palestrina’s setting of Stabat
Mater dolorosa, a poetic depiction of the Virgin Mary at the foot of the
cross, as well as an intercessory prayer to the Holy Mother and Jesus Christ.
Palestrina’s compositional style was influenced by the precepts of the Council
of Trent, which stated that sacred music should be reverential, simple, and
that the words sung should always be clearly audible. There is, as stated in
the programme notes, a “simple nobility of musical language” in the work, which
the choir (without the aid of FOCUS! Singers) sang with great feeling and musicality.
Throughout the concert, conductor John Washburn did a wonderful job of blending
the voices of the choir, made up of professional singers, soloists in the own
right, into a beautiful vocal ensemble.
The first half of the concert ended
with Thomas Tallis’ setting of The
Lamentations of Jeremiah. Like Byrd, Tallis was an avowed Roman Catholic
that prospered in Anglican England. Tallis’s music was more complex,
contrapuntally as well as harmonically, than that of Byrd and Palestrina. I
could not help wonder about Tallis’s mindset when setting words like
How deserted lies the city, once so full of people…
Judah has gone into exile, after affliction and
harsh labor…
Her foes have become her master…
Her children have gone into exile.
Did he write this music, using
“safe” biblical verses, as a veiled protest to the persecution of Catholics in
England? Again, the choir acquitted itself admirably, and sang beautifully this
extensive and heartfelt work.
The choir continued its programme in
the second half with Claudio Monteverdi’s poignant setting of Lagrime d’Amante al Sepolcro dell’ Amata,
inspired (as the excellent notes tell us) by the death of a beautiful and
talented singer who was a student of his. Although the notes refer to this work
as a Baroque madrigal, I felt that it was musically and stylistically closer to
the Renaissance works that were sung in the first half. It is no accident that
Monteverdi is the father of Italian opera, for the work here is musically
varied and intensely dramatic. Once again, the choir rose to the challenges of
Monteverdi’s difficult. There was, in the louder passages of the work,
shrillness, perhaps an edge, in the sound of the sopranos that marred this
otherwise immaculate performance.
The choir returned to the religious atmosphere
with the last two works of the concert. Antonio Lotti’s Crucifixus, with its brief text taken from the Credo of the Catholic Mass (“He was crucified also for us, suffered
under Pontius Pilate and was buried”), is an amazingly intense, stark and beautiful
work, with beautiful dissonances and very sensitive text setting. For me this
brief work was a discovery and the highlight of the evening.
The programme ended with Tomás de
Victoria’s Magnificat primi toni,
words spoken by the Virgin Mary in response to the Angel Gabriel’s
Annunciation, from the Gospel of Saint Luke. I had not even heard of the names
of these last two composers, and was very grateful for the discovery. The
composer obviously felt drawn to the words of the Magnificat, since he wrote no less than 18 musical settings to it.
Other than the one soprano voice that unfortunately stood out from the sound of
the choir, the concert ended on a joyful note with this lovely performance.
In this Fall season, with Winter
just around the corner, we can be thankful that we can draw inspiration from
such life-affirming words and music.
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