Master Chorale finishes season with final concerts
Will perform ‘Remembrance, Recollection, Reflection, Rest’ on Sunday at church
After the last two tumultuous years, the South Holland Master Chorale spring concert program takes on new meaning.
“We offer this program as a requiem, as a memorial, for any and all who lost loved ones in the last two and a half years,” said Albert M. Jackson, musical director of the chorale. “Lots of choruses are doing this piece now, towards the end, we hope, of COVID, because it’s so appropriate given the point in history that we’re in.”
The South Holland Master Chorale will perform “Remembrance, Recollection, Reflection, Rest,” the final concerts of its season at 4 p.m. Sunday at St. Joseph Catholic Church in Homewood and at 4 p.m. May 22 at Christ Our Savior (formerly St. Jude Apostle) Catholic Church in South Holland.
Admission is free. Chicago area organist Graeme Shields and a select group of chamber players will accompany the chorale.
The program consists of two pieces, Franz Joseph Haydn’s “Missa Brevis No. 7 and contemporary composer Dan Forrest’s “Requiem for the Living.”
Jackson originally had selected the two pieces for a May 2020 performance, but the concert was canceled due to the pandemic.
At this point, “the requiem takes on so much more meaning because there have been so many, you may as well say a million people in this country alone who have died of COVID,” he said.
Composed in 1778, the Haydn piece is known as the “Little Organ Mass,” as one of the movements in it is “a beautiful, soaring sopranos with solo organ accompaniment.” The piece by Forrest is very modern, “glorious work,” Jackson said, written in 2013. And while the Haydn work is very short at 15 minutes long, and the Forrest piece is close to 45 minutes long.
“Both of them are almost entirely in Latin. Because Haydn in Austria, he and the royal family for which he worked, everybody was Catholic, so they would do this Mass in the original Latin language, Jackson said.
“And one of the very interesting things about this ‘Little Organ Mass,’ like I said, it’s very short, it might be 15-20 minutes long. The thing about it is the Latin Mass is actually very long, it would take an hour to say all of the stuff in the Mass, but neither Haydn nor the prince for whom he worked wanted to spend that much time in church.
“So in the really long sections in the Mass, Haydn would have the sopranos singing one text and the altos singing another text and the tenors singing a third text and the basses singing a fourth text,” he said. “So he would get through about 20 minutes of Latin in about three minutes because all of the text was being sung at the same time.”
Although a requiem is a Mass that is sung at a funeral, Forrest intended his “Requiem for the Living” for those who are living.
“It’s a memorial, but really for those who move on in life,” Jackson said.
The entire requiem, with the exception of one verse, is in Latin.
“There’s one phrase which is out of one of the Gospels, it’s the words of Christ. This edition is in English, so that nothing else, the audience can understand those words,” Jackson
said.
“Forrest said ‘that’s why I wrote the Mass. That’s what I’m trying to get across in the Mass.’ And he even gave instructions in the musical score that if possible, wherever this work is done in all the world, those words would be sung in the language of whatever country it’s being done in.”
The verse is from the Gospel of Matthew 11:28-30: “Come unto me all ye who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.”
“That was his intent, to make sure those specific words would be heard and understood in their native language by any audience anywhere on Earth,” Jackson said.
The performances are Jackson’s final two concerts with the chorale. After 23 seasons as musical director, the Chesterton, Indiana, resident is retiring. Next
year, the chorale will be taken over by Phil Bauman.
“It’s been fantastic. We’ve been able to range through a vast body of tremendous choral literature over the last many years,” Jackson said. “And the chorus is just a wonderful group of people. They are talented, they are eager. They are people of good hearts and I very much look forward to hearing them as an audience member and not as
the conductor always picking away at the little things I think need improvement.
“So I think it’s a very exciting time for the chorale and for the new conductor,” he said. “And I certainly hoping that our faithful audience members will continue to come to all of the concerts in the future.”