The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Tour a choral-orchestral ‘feast’ for Yale groups, London choir
a hectic time for professor/conductor David Hill, who from March 8-14 will lead a five-concert, weeklong tour featuring the Yale Philharmonia, The Bach Choir of London and Yale Schola Cantorum from Woolsey Hall to the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.
“It’s huge, actually,” he said in a phone chat about the “English Musical Splendor” program and tour the other day, having just returned from London, where he worked on a portion of it with The Bach Choir.
Hill is not only music director of that choir and other groups in the U.K., but also conducts the Yale Schola Cantorum at Yale Institute of Sacred Music and will lead the Philharmonia in this spring highlight of its yearlong 125th anniversary.
“We’ll be moving some 250 people around (from New Haven to Boston’s Symphony Hall to New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Devine, Philadelphia’s Irvine Auditoriam at UPenn and D.C. through March 14). It takes place during spring break week at Yale.”
The program features Charles Villiers Stanford’s “Song to the Soul”; Arnold Bax’s “Mater ora filium”; Vaughan Williams’ “FanIt’s tasia on the “Old 104th” Psalm Tune with solo piano by Yale School of Music Dean Robert Blocker; and William Walton’s “Belshazzar’s Feast” featuring professsional baritone David Pershall.
Asked why he chose this program for the tour, Hill said, “A lot of reasons. Stanford’s ‘Song to the Soul’ was set to the words of Walt Whitman, whose work resides here at Yale (at the Beinecke). And Stanford was going to visit Yale, receive an honorary degree and perform at Norfolk (in 1915) but was he was unable to because the Luisitania sank and no one could get passage from Europe.”
The Cantorum will sing the 12-minute Bax piece with no orchestral accompaniment. Then there’s the piece, “Psalm 104,” by Vaughan Williams, a onetime student of Stanford who visited Yale in 1954 to receive the University’s Howland Prize and deliver a lecture. “It’s basically a piano concerto,” said Hill.
The main attraction, however, in the second half of the program, is the resounding “Belshazzar’s Feast,” said Hill, “which is an iconic orchestra-choral piece wellknown in England.”
We suggest it seems challenging to play. “Really, really hard,” said Hill, “but it will be fun to put together.”
As the story goes for Belshazzar’s Feast (famously depicted in a Rembrandt painting where the king miraculously sees a hand writing on the wall), the Jews are in exile in Babylon. During a feast, the Babylonian king Belshazzar commits sacrilege by using the Jews’ sacred vessels to praise the heathen gods. He suddenly dies, the kingdom falls, and the Jews regain their freedom.
“It’s extraordinary,” said Hill of the dramatic musical piece, “with its Old Testament imagery. But it borders on the secular for what it says about human behavior.”
What makes this piece so special? “The architecture of it, how he (Walton) drives the piece and the narrative,” Hill said.