Tag Archives: seattle choral company

Arts & Entertainment, Music

At St. Mark’s, Three Britten Works from Seattle Choral Company

(Photo: Seattle Choral Company)

Chorus America’s annual conference is being held in Seattle next week, from June 12 to the 15th. This is also the centenary of the great 20th century English composer Benjamin Britten’s birth, and many of his works are being performed around Seattle. The two occasions come together with the performances by Seattle Symphony, its Chorale, Seattle Pro Musica, and Seattle Boychoir of his mighty War Requiem this Thursday and Saturday at Benaroya Hall.

First however, Seattle Choral Company has played its part with a performance Saturday night at St. Mark’s Cathedral of three shorter Britten works, including the Cantata Misericordium, which some consider a postscript to the Requiem. He wrote it in 1963, the year after the premiere of the Requiem (which had been commissioned to celebrate the reconsecration of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral after it was bombed to bits in WWII).

While the Requiem is about the horror and destructiveness of war (as Britten quotes from WWI poet Wilfred Owen: “My subject is War and the pity of War”), Cantata Misericordium is about the chances of compassionate action to relieve suffering after violence. It was commissioned by the international Red Cross to celebrate its 100th anniversary, and Britten chose to set the parable of the Good Samaritan, employing Latin as a universal language.

As he did with the Requiem he wanted soloists from previously warring countries, and for both he wanted English tenor Peter Pears, and German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Diskau.

Eric Neuville, tenor

Seattle Choral Company founder and artistic director Freddie Coleman chose tenor Eric Neuville to sing The Samaritan and baritone Charles Robert Stephens to sing The Traveler, with the full chorus as narrator and commentator and accompanied by small orchestra. These were good choices, particularly Stephens, a fine dramatic singer who portrayed expressively his apprehensiveness and fear, then fright and hurt after being set upon by the thieves. The chorus could have been a bit more outraged at the cold response from the priest at the Traveler’s calls for help, but were more shocked at the Levite’s similar response.

Neuville could have used more drama in his initial discovery of the injured man but became steadily more expressive as the work continued. Despite being in Latin, the story is so well known it was easy to follow, and the English words were side by side with the Latin ones. Britten’s music surrounds and lifts the story, spurring it onward and wrapping the whole together.

Charles Robert Stephens, baritone

Prior to the Cantata, SCC sang two 1940s works of Britten set to words of the poet W.H. Auden.  The chorus’s Cappella group opened the concert from the back of the cathedral with a fine performance of the Chorale after an Old French Carol, a stately prayer and intercession, becoming more passionate as it continues.

It followed this with the Hymn to St. Cecilia, which was less successful. After the first stanza and the repeated chorus, Auden’s words become somewhat odd and increasingly cryptic for what is usually a paean to the goddess of music, and the program notes leaned heavily on Auden’s harsh and unkind attitude towards Britten.

The music itself is glorious, but needs clarity in the harmonic lines, with the pure sopranos sounding separate, floating on top. SCC has an excellent soprano section and good soloists, but somehow the separation and the clarity weren’t there. They did better in the second section which needs to be light and almost disembodied, but somehow the whole performance felt like a painting which needs cleaning in order to see the clear colors intended by the artist, in this case, Britten. And, to really hear the music, one needs to ignore the baggage of Auden’s and Britten’s discordant relationship.

After intermission, SCC introduced the audience to the music of Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo, with two works, Dark Night of the Soul and its companion, Luminous Night of the Soul, performed without interruption. Gjeilo uses small orchestra and piano to accompany the chorus, and his intent is to make the piano not an accompaniment but an equal partner. These are works which range from minimalist piano with long choral lines over it, to gentle slow melodies to spare harmonies to rippling piano in rich Rachmaninoff style. The combination of piano solos interleaved with the choral line works well, though words were hard to hear. Pianist Lisa Bergman handled her role with ease and excellent attention to balance with the singers.

Arts & Entertainment, Music

Vigil or Vespers, Rachmaninov’s Work Gets Serene Treatment from Seattle Choral Company

Seattle Choral Company (Photo: SCC)

No, Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (last performance June 9, 8 p.m., at St. Marks) does not last all night. You aren’t sitting there until the dawn comes up listening to glorious music (though it’s so lovely you might want it never to end).

It was so named when Eastern Orthodox churches put together groups of their liturgical offices to read and sing together, including this one for different offices from dusk to early morning. It actually lasts about an hour.

Rachmaninov composed this supremely serene setting for the vigil in the midst of World War I, not long before the Russian Revolution. It has become well loved outside its church environs, but it felt particularly appropriate to be hearing it as sung by Seattle Choral Company within the walls of St. Mark’s Cathedral Friday night.

The performance began with three other brief works of Orthodox sacred music. Mircea Diaconescu’s Lumina Lina immediately took the listener into the feel of old Orthodox music, albeit with some modern harmonies, and was followed by John Tavener’s Eonia (Eternity) and two prayers from Drei Geistliche Gesänge set by Alfred Schnittke.

A choir of some fifty-plus singers under founding conductor and artistic director Freddie Coleman, SCC has sung the Vigil (also knows as the Vespers) before, most recently eight years ago. From the start, its performance Friday (repeated tonight, Saturday) invoked a sense of gentle peacefulness. Throughout its fifteen sections, Coleman kept the tempi flowing, mostly unhurried and steady but with occasional faster parts. Rachmaninov, not a particularly religious man, nevertheless understood and knew the traditional music of the Church and much of what he wrote for the Vigil lies closely in that vein.

Phrasing and shaping were beautifully subtle, with moments of hushed reverence and others of joyful excitement, while Coleman’s pacing made sure that all the voices, singing unaccompanied for the entire concert, sounded as fresh and warm at the end as at the beginning. There was never any forcing or pushing. Occasional brief solo moments were taken by choir members, notably some pure high tenor singing from Justin Ferris.

Orthodox music is not emotional in a sense of having drama in it, nor much dynamic range. It’s more a cumulative hypnotic effect drawing you further and further into the music and the words which of course are the reason for the music.

SCC sang so clearly that it was quite easy to keep place in the program with the words, and the program itself was a model of how a work like this, sung in a language with which we don’t even share an alphabet, can be brought home to the listeners. A short description preceded the words of each section, and these were in three columns, first the Russian in Cyrillic, then phonetic Russian in our Roman alphabet, lastly the translation.

I hope we don’t have to wait another eight years before Seattle Choral Company sings this again.