Cover image: Cappella Romana with visiting choral director Timo Nuoranne (Photo courtesy Cappella Romana)
St. James Cathedral is the perfect space in which to hear Cappella Romana. The sonorities of the deep voices and the pure quality of all the voices in this unaccompanied choir make harmonies as clean as they can be, sometimes creating overtones if you listen carefully, and enhanced by the acoustics of the setting, as well as its ambiance.
Friday night, the group sang a program of largely Orthodox music from mainly Nordic countries titled “Arctic II: Northern Exposure,” all of it composed in the past century. (Their next concert at St. James is January 5th, with Orthodox Greek chant ancient and recent, for the Christmas season.)
Visiting choral director from Finland, Timo Nuoranne (who was supposed to conduct a Romana concert last winter but had visa delays), worked closely with Cappella Romana to create a program which would be both varied as to composers and countries but still have a semblance of the order in an Orthodox Vespers. Several works came from the pen of Estonia’s Cyrillus Kreek, whose work couldn’t be performed in his own country under Russian occupation but who is now coming into his own as a choral composer on the same level as the much-better-known-here Arvo Pärt.
The first three works, all quite short Psalm settings by Kreek, mirror the feeling in the words, a restful Psalm 104, peaceful and trusting excerpts from Psalms 1-3 and prayerful in Psalm 141. Kreek’s harmonies are open and clear even when clashing, which seems a contradiction in terms but didn’t sound that way, and the folk elements he wove in make these settings very accessible. All three showed off the excellent blend between the choir’s voices, the perfect pitch sense which pervaded everything they sang, and the balance between sopranos, altos, tenors and basses.
Later in the program three other Psalm settings of Kreek’s were harmonically more adventurous but equally sensitive to the words, even if most of the audience was not familiar with the Estonian language (translations were side by side in the program notes). The pain and desolation in Psalm 22, the more descriptive Psalm 137, are not only in the music but were brought out with expressive artistry by the choir under Nuoranne.
Danish choral composer Per Nørgård also had several works on the program, these set to Latin texts. Imaginative harmonies ended unexpectedly without resolution in the Advent hymn “Flos ut Rosa floruit,” light lines ran all over simultaneously like ripples on water characterizing his “Gaudet mater ecclesia,” and a bit of his “Agnus Dei” was another which ended without resolution.
Finland’s Boris Jakubov, Sweden’s Sven-Erik Back and, a generation younger than the others, Thomas Jennefelt (b.1954), Norway’s Knut Nystedt, Finland’s Pekka Attinen and, maybe two generations older, Norway’s Edvard Grieg, between them made clear the wide-ranging ferment of choral musical ideas continuing all century in Scandinavia, much of it unknown to us. The amazing unexpected harmonies in Nystedt’s dramatic ”Veni”; the wild, emphatic, clashing, and suddenly silent moments in “O Domine” of Jennefelt, with the soprano solo taken by Emily Lau whose voice with its warm underpinnings and soaring top was a pleasure; were all very different, absorbing to hear.
Lastly the three Grieg songs, with fine soloists Mark Powell, bass, and David Hendrix and Chris Engbretson, tenors, were almost a coming home to familiar music for many listeners despite some very unusual harmonies, for the men only, in part of the first one “Hvad est du dog skjon” (had it not seemed highly unlikely with this group, one might have thought they had lost their pitches).
The group’s encore was a serene setting by a composer from Lapland, Jan Sandström, of “Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming” for which one had to listen hard to hear the original melody by Michael Praetorius.
We hear so much superb music in Seattle, and at least three quarters is that of tried and true familiar composers. Wonderful as that is, it’s a refreshing delight to hear the music sung by groups such as Cappella Romana, which never ceases to bring us superb performances often of completely unfamiliar music, impeccably researched and musically moving. Or it can be an unusual setting of something we know well. This concert was another such.
