Choir presents contemporary music for a winter’s day
This Saturday, the Grand Philharmonic Choir’s concert “Gloria” will feature a new work by Canadian composer Nicholas Ryan Kelly along with several other contemporary pieces, the oldest composed in 1959.
“They’re really great pieces but they don’t get played a lot partly because they’re short,” said the choir’s artistic director, Mark Vuorinen. “They’re challenging to sing but quite beautiful.”
The centrepiece of the concert will be Nicholas Ryan Kelly’s choral work “Celestial Dream,” with text from Walt Whitman’s “Proud Music of the Storm.” In the poem, the poet tells of a dreamer awakening from sleep and seeing that the world has been illuminated by music.
“Celestial Dream” was the winning entry in the inaugural Grand Philharmonic Choir’s choral composition competition last year. The piece was a unanimous choice by judges who worked independently of each other, poring over anonymous scores sent in by Canadian composers age 30 and under and hailing from across the country. The 30-year old Kelly will travel from his home in Penticton, B.C., to the Grand Philharmonic’s concert on Saturday.
On March 3 and 4, Kelly’s work “The Immortal” will be premièred in the DaCapo Chamber Choir’s concerts. Kelly won that choir’s 2017 NewWorks Competition, with this new piece.
Vuorinen said what makes Kelly’s music so powerful is his deep understanding of choral voices, how to use the various tonal qualities to enhance the music.
“He writes for the voice really well,” said Vuorinen.
Kelly is not new to winning competitions. Since 2015, both his choral and wind ensemble pieces have taken several national and international awards, including the North Dakota-based Edwin Fissinger Choral Composition Prize.
Also on the concert program will be music from Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms” a score with recognizable tunes given the great composer used excerpts from the score he originally wrote for “West Side Story.”
“Chichester Psalms” is performed in Hebrew and uses music to explore the struggle between war and peace. According to Vuorinen, the score has one of the all-time most beautiful melodies.
“It’s very singable,” he said. “It’s musical theatre.”
Francis Poulenc’s “Gloria” is one of the French composer’s most celebrated works, premièred in Boston in 1961 by the Boston Symphony.
Vuorinen said the piece is tricky for the choir to sing, they really have to “work at it” before settling into this “powerful piece that is bold and kinda cheeky.”
He compares the score to a composer simply being saucy, “sticking his tongue out” at the conventions of musical composition.
“It’s fun to sing and fun to hear,” he said.
“Psalm 150” is by another Canadian composer, Timothy Corlis, who studied physics at the University of Waterloo with music as an elective. “Psalm 150” which also includes some Hebrew
text, was originally commissioned by Conrad Grebel University College in celebration of the school’s 50th anniversary in 2013.
The Saturday concert program will also include soloists, soprano Natasha Campbell and countertenor Daniel Cabena. The Guelph-based singer performs in this high vocal range that is equivalent to a female mezzosoprano, a style of singing that is not often heard and difficult to perform with finesse.