AnnuAl Good FridAy show An ensemBle effort
Cantata Singers and Pacifica Singers join program
The Vancouver Chamber Choir’s Good Friday programs at the Orpheum are one of the highlights of the choral season. Indeed, the idea of music with serious spiritual heft gives a welcome focus for many listeners on the Easter weekend.
There’s an important subtext to this year’s performance, featuring sacred music by Morten Lauridsen, Gabriel Faure (adapted by the chamber choir’s Jon Washburn), and Sergei Rachmaninov: the idea of inter-ensemble collaboration. The chamber choir will be joined by the Vancouver Cantata Singers and the Pacifica Singers.
The latter is the cadet branch of the chamber choir organization, now being conducted by Fiona Blackburn.
“Pacifica started out as the Vancouver Chorale, an ensemble that Jon Washburn could call on when he needed bigger forces,” explains Blackburn. “But Pacifica rather quickly developed its own identity and its own sound.”
Vancouver Cantata Singers is a completely independent ensemble just about to celebrate its 60th anniversary.
“I think Jon and the Vancouver Chamber Choir need to be commended for inviting three choirs to take turns singing with them, each singing one of the program’s three works,” says Cantata musical director Paula Kremer.
“We are thrilled to join with the Chamber Choir for the Vespers.”
Kremer adds: “Collaborations are terrific for choral music in the city, and it’s great for the audience
to hear the combined sound of these two ensembles. So many of the singers at this level in the city know one another, so it is wonderful to see the two choirs rehearse with so many happy greetings and hugs. I’m of the opinion that working with guest conductors is a beneficial experience for any ensemble. In this case, the same result comes from us being a guest choir.”
Blackburn agrees enthusiastically about the benefits of collaboration, but is it difficult for a conductor to send “her” singers into a collaborative setting ?
“It’s a little more angst-ridden than I had thought,” she said.
“And yet I just loved watching them with the chamber choir singers last December. Some of them were very excited for their first time on the Orpheum stage. There are things they have to know, like when the conductor turns around, you lower your score in your left hand. We are all control freaks, and these things have to be just so”
Pacifica joins in the concluding work of the program, Morten Lauridsen’s Lux aeterna.
“I heard it live for the first time in L.A. last year, and it’s very emotional,” says Blackburn. “What he’s managed to do with his source material, to create this incredible stillness. It’s all about light and darkness; it ends with such a joyful expression of thankfulness and joy and light.”
The Cantata Singers are part of the program’s anchor work, Sergei Rachmaninov’s profoundly intense All-Night Vigil, also known outside of Russia as Vespers.
“It can seem rather harmonically simple at first glance, somewhat folk-like. But it’s far from easy. It’s a really big sing, considering range, tessitura, number of parts, line, and richness of sonority. The joining of the two choirs — 56 singers in total — makes this possible,” Kremer said.
“Rachmaninov wasn’t a conventional church-goer, so I can only wonder if this deeply moving and sacred a cappella work, written in Church Slavonic in 1915, was what he needed to compose in response to what was surrounding him politically in Russia and Europe at the time.
“The Vespers is a prayer, it’s a celebration, it’s a dance, it’s a chant. There is a complexity of texture that manages still to have a transparency of line. At times it’s explosively dramatic, and at other times intimately contemplative and blissfully devout.”