Choral offerings diverse in solemnity
Among the noteworthy concerts in the coming days will be three choral-music programs that are all very different, but all well-suited to the solemnity of Remembrance Day, which falls on Saturday.
That afternoon, the 40-voice CapriCCio Vocal Ensemble, conducted by its founder, Michael Gormley, will offer its 29th annual Remembrance Day concert, which this year will commemorate the centenary of the Battle of Vimy Ridge (2 p.m., Christ Church Cathedral, $25/$22/$10, under 13 and veterans free; capriccio.ca).
The diverse program features composers ranging from Elgar to a handful of contemporary figures, among them Arvo Pärt and Torontobased Eleanor Daley. The biggest work on the program is Lux Aeterna, a half-hour-long, idiosyncratic Requiem by Morten Lauridsen, a popular American composer who has received his country’s National Medal of Arts. Lauridsen composed this moving work in 1997 in response to his mother’s death, and the five movements are all based on sacred Latin texts dealing with light.
The concert will also feature the première of A Stone of Hope, by Robert Kowalewski, a member of CapriCCio’s tenor section who is a professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Victoria. His new piece was inspired by a visit to the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington, D.C., and is a setting of King’s own words.
On Sunday, the Victoria Philharmonic Choir, conducted by Peter Butterfield, will launch a season built around the theme of peace, with a program comprising two ambitious works by contemporaries who could not have been more different: Vaughan Williams’s cantata Dona nobis pacem and Puccini’s Messa di Gloria, both scored for mixed choir, vocal soloists and orchestra (3 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall, $30/$15, under 14 free; vpchoir.ca).
Dona nobis pacem (“grant us peace”) is at once a prayer and a warning, composed in 1936 when war in Europe loomed, and while often serene and ultimately hopeful the score includes some harrowing and despairing war music. Vaughan Williams, who served in the medical corps in France during the First World War, drew on texts ranging from the Bible and the Latin Mass to Whitman’s Civil War poetry and a speech by the 19th-century British statesman John Bright.
Puccini’s Messa di Gloria (no, that doesn’t mean “Glorious Mess”) is a grand Mass that is at once appropriately solemn and unabashedly operatic, like Verdi’s Requiem. It was completed in 1880, when Puccini was just 21, and served as the thesis marking his graduation from music school in his native Lucca, Italy. Some consider it his greatest non-operatic work, though the score came to light only in 1951.
(Incidentally, Puccini simply called it Mass for Four Voices with Orchestra, but it was erroneously titled Messa di Gloria in the first published edition, and that moniker has stuck. A “Messa di Gloria” is a type of Mass, once popular in Naples, comprising only the opening Kyrie and Gloria sections, like a Lutheran Missa brevis, though Puccini actually set the full Latin Mass text.)
Also on Sunday, the Victoria Baroque Players will return to the sacred vocal music of Bach, which has been at the core of their repertoire since their debut in 2011 (7:30 p.m., Church of St. John the Divine, $28/$25/$5; victoria-baroque.com). The ensemble will be joined by five vocal soloists and, as usual in choral music, by the two dozen voices of the St. John’s Chamber Singers, directed by David Stratkauskas.
The program is intended to both mark Remembrance Day and look ahead to the Christmas season, and the two principal works are appropriate early cantatas by Bach: Aus der Tiefen rufe ich, Herr, zu dir (Out of the depths I cry to Thee, O Lord), BWV 131, which draws on Psalm 130; and the popular Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland (Now come, Saviour of the gentiles), BWV 61, intended for the first Sunday of Advent.
The program will also include a motet and a couple of smaller works by Bach, a Magnificat setting (another nod to Advent) by Bach’s great predecessor Dieterich Buxtehude, and an aria by Telemann, who continues to enjoy his “moment” here, 2017 being the 250th anniversary of his death.