Group beautifully evokes themes of love and sorrow
For its final program of the season, the LancasterChorale has turned to primal passions and elemental emotions.
In “The Heart’s Passion,” the chorale performs songs that glorify nature, celebrate romance and commemorate the casualties of war.
In the second of two solo appearances in greater Columbus this season, the chorale performed the program Saturday night at Worthington United Methodist Church. The same concert will be given this afternoon at St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in the chorale’s home base of Lancaster.
Conducted with sensitivity and subtlety by artistic director Stephen Caracciolo, the 28-voice ensemble opened with Johannes Brahms’ song cycle “Zigeunerlieder” (which makes use of Hungarian “gypsy poems” subsequently
translated into German).
The chorale sang with full-bodied verve indicative of the work’s roots, while pianist Deborah Fox provided accompaniment both graceful and occasionally virtuosic. In between songs, Jennifer Hambrick of WOSA (101.1 FM) read the poems in English.
Following an intermission, the chorale shifted to a cappella singing — and stirringly so. Highlights included Hugo Alfven’s “Aftonen,” a piece evoking the stillness of dusk in its haunting sotto voce passages.
Also lovely was John Clements’ “Flower of Beauty,” a reverent, hymn-like piece sung in homage to a bride-to-be. The chorale enunciated such ecstatic verses as “She is my slender small love, my flow’r of beauty, she” in dulcet tones.
And Maurice Ravel’s “Trois beaux oiseaux du paradis” sounded notes of sorrow for those fallen in World War I.
Pianist Fox returned for the concluding piece, a selection of three songs from Edward Elgar’s “From the Bavarian Highlands.” Using texts by Elgar’s wife, Alice, the songs touch on at least two of the threads that ran through the concert: “False Love” is both a paean to the change in seasons and a lament of unrequited love, while “Lullaby” reflects a mother’s love for her son and “The Dance” celebrates a dancing couple’s merriment.
The chorale sang each with terrific skill and intense feeling — qualities also apparent in a heavenly encore performance of “Danny Boy.”