Choral programs lead up to Remembrance Day

Remembrance Day is two weeks away, and three choral programs scheduled in the week preceding it all defer to the solemnity of the occasion. The emphasis in all three, appropriately, is on works such as Requiems, though not necessarily on traditional idioms.

Indeed, each program includes a popular major work by a living composer that is eclectic, ecumenical and multicultural, reflecting a trend that has lately been conspicuous in largescale choral music on “spiritual” topics.

Such works also often blur the line between classical and popular music in their quest for a style accessible to the broadest public.

One work along these lines, Eternal Light, a 45-minute Requiem by Howard Goodall, will be performed by the University of Victoria’s Chamber Singers on Nov. 6, under the direction of Garry Froese. (12:30 p.m., Phillip T. Young Recital Hall, UVic, by donation.)

Much of Goodall’s career is devoted to composing music for film, television and the theatre, and to broadcasting and educational work. But he is also a popular composer of choral music. Eternal Light has been performed hundreds of times since its première, in 2008.

Seeking primarily to comfort the bereaved, Goodall felt uncomfortable with those parts of the traditional Requiem dealing with judgment and damnation; he focused instead on those parts dealing with eternal rest.

“I stripped down the old Latin texts to a few phrases in each movement,” he said, “and laid beside them words from English poems from across the last 500 years” — among them In Flanders Fields.

The work is scored for choir, vocal soloists, harp and (in the reduced version the Chamber Singers will perform) piano and organ.

Also on Nov. 6, the 80-voice Victoria Philharmonic Choir, conducted by Peter Butterfield, will perform for the first time this season, in a program whose highlight is another monument of the modern choral repertoire: The Armed Man: A Mass for Peace, by the Welsh composer Karl Jenkins. (8 p.m., Farquhar Auditorium, $28/$14, under 16 free; 250-721-8480, tickets.uvic.ca, UVic Ticket Centre.)

Jenkins, too, has written for film, television and the theatre — even for advertising — and his multifaceted career has straddled the classical, jazz and rock worlds.

In his concert works, not surprisingly, he favours an easily digested idiom that has won him a considerable crossover audience. (He was knighted this year.)

The Armed Man, which runs about an hour, takes its title from L’homme armé, a Medieval song whose tune was appropriated by Mass composers many times beginning about 1450. Jenkins even quotes one such Mass, by Palestrina.

But he does not merely place himself within a venerable western tradition. He updates it to reflect modern multicultural sensibilities, by interspersing, among the traditional Mass sections, movements based on texts from various religious and secular traditions — the Bible, the Mahabharata, English poetry.

After the introductory presentation of the “armed man” melody, the first music we hear is not a Kyrie but a Muslim call to prayer.

This, moreover, is a contemporary “mass in a time of war,” composed in 1999 and dedicated to victims of the recent crisis in Kosovo. It is ultimately an anti-war statement, a plea for peace.

The 35-piece Naden Band of the Royal Canadian Navy — woodwinds, brass, percussion — will serve as the choir’s orchestra, and will perform several instrumental selections, while the choir, a cappella, will also perform three short pieces by Philip Moore based on texts by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor and theologian whose defiance of the Nazis led to his execution in a concentration camp.

Finally, on Nov. 11 itself, the CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble will begin its season as it always does, with a special Remembrance Day program. (2 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, $25/$22/$10, veterans and under 13 free; capriccio.ca.)

The principal works are Louis Vierne’s grand, aptly titled Messe solennelle, from 1900, for choir and two organs, and an a cappella Requiem from 1993, for choir and soloists, by the Canadian composer Eleanor Daley.

The latter is a deeply personal work drawing not only on the traditional Latin text but on the Bible, the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, the Russian Benediction, and poems by Carolyn Smart and Mary Elizabeth Frye.