Contemporary works for Vancouver choirs
Easter programs celebrate new music
Elektra Women’s Choir and Chor Leoni Men’s Choir present Passion and Resurrection April 12, 7: 30 p. m. | Chan Centre Tickets & info: $ 30 adults and seniors, $ 15 students, elektra.ca, chorleoni.org Vancouver Bach Choir presents Brahms and Gorecki April 12, 8 p. m. | Orpheum Theatre Tickets & info: $ 20, vancouverbachchoir.com Vancouver Chamber Choir presents Eternal Light: Mozart & Lauridsen April 18, 8 p. m. | Orpheum Theatre Tickets & info: $ 31.50 to $ 57.20, vancouverchamberchoir.com
During the next 10 days, four major Vancouver choirs showcase contemporary music in Easter season programs. This is a compelling demonstration of an interesting trend in classical music, and quite a change in an environment where the concept of “new music” used to be greeted with general suspicion, if not outright hostility.
Until very recently, choral organizations tended to be ultraconservative and especially reluctant to program new works. Except for the occasional blockbuster like Orff’s ubiquitous Carmina Burana, modernist choral idioms held little allure for audiences, and less for singers who found new repertoire difficult and ungrateful. Much of that has changed: now choirs willingly sing music by the likes of John Tavener, Arvo Part, Ola Gjeilo, and Eric Whitacre, and audiences flock to hear works that are, in every definition of the word, popular.
No composer of the recent past has garnered more of this popular acclaim than the late Henryk Gorecki ( 1933- 2010), whose 1981 Miserere is featured on the Vancouver Bach Choir’s April 12 program at the Orpheum. His Third Symphony ( Symphony of Sorrowful Songs), written half a decade earlier, was a success of unimaginable proportions, propelling a modest and unassuming composer to world fame.
On his only visit to Vancouver to attend a Vancouver Symphony performance of the Third Symphony in 1995, Gorecki spoke to the audience about his life and work. His direct manner and a certain brusque simplicity came across loud and clear despite translation issues. Gorecki made his point: he was no mystic living in the clouds. Composers live in this world and are practical beings (“concrete” was a word he favoured). His music was a reflection of what he believed as an artist in response to the world as he found it.
Gorecki’s Miserere is both topical and timeless, on one level a response in music to the trials of Poland’s turbulent Solidarity era; and it sets a snippet of Latin text using a musical language that reaches back to chant and folksong. Gorecki’s music has a haunting beauty, but it is a beauty born both of our world and of centuries of musical practice. Gorecki’s work will not be the only new music to be heard this month; also on April 12, at the Chan Centre, Elektra Women’s Choir and Chor Leoni Men’s Choir join forces to present two recently composed works for voices.
David Lang’s 2007 new music hit The Little Match Girl Passion won the Pulitzer Prize for best composition in 2008. This will be its first Vancouver performance. Also on the program is a piece by Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds. His Passion and Resurrection dates from 2005 and, like Lang’s work, has been heard worldwide (“Though not yet in Australia,” admitted the composer). Conversing on the phone from Portland, Esenvalds explained that the Latvian choral tradition has a long history, and that, like most Latvian composers, he himself has sung in choirs all his life. The commission for Passion and Resurrection was important to him.
“I worked on the piece very carefully, having had such wonderful experience as a singer and knowing how good the choir was, so it had to be of very high standard! Of course there was an emotional side of the piece — I myself am a believer, and the Passion story is the basis of all Christianity. I wanted to tell that story.”
His country’s choral tradition became a way of maintaining national values during the years when Latvia was an unwilling part of the Soviet Union.
“Our music was hidden from the rest of the world, but we still composed. When the Soviet Union collapsed, we had the feeling that we ourselves could now bloom 100 per cent, finally breathe fresh air and share who we are and what we had in Latvian culture. Singing together in joined voices was essential, every small town had its own choir. In the 1990s this tradition was at last free to be shared.”
The remarkable conjunction of new works for choir extends for another week to the Vancouver Chamber Choir’s annual Good Friday concert, back at the Orpheum, April 18. The major work is Mozart’s Requiem, but also on tap is an easy- on- the- ears contemporary opus, Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeternum.
Representing the generation between Gorecki and Esenvalds, Lauridsen was born in Washington state, raised in Portland, but has spent a long and distinguished career based in Los Angeles teaching at the prestigious University of Southern California. He’s made an extraordinary commitment to creating choral music and, in turn, has become one of the most published, recorded and performed choral composers in living memory.
Like the other works being given Vancouver performances, Lux Aeternum is an extended composition. Cast in five movements, it evokes music and musical process from the Renaissance as well as from earlier Gregorian chants. In a note about the work, Lauridsen comments: “Lux Aeterna — Eternal Light — is an intimate work of quiet serenity centred around a universal symbol of hope, reassurance, goodness, and illumination at all levels.”