Choral ensemble presents ‘The Food of Love’
“The Food of Love” — the theme of Quintessence’s first paired concerts of its 30th season — may have a familiar ring.
The words are from a famous phrase spoken in Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night”: “If music be the food of love, play on.” The 26-voice choral ensemble intends to sing on.
The concerts, said Matthew Greer, artistic director of the Albuquerque-based choral ensemble, are all about the joys of music.
They feature the music of Bradley Ellingboe, Stephen Sametz, Stephen Chatman, Daniel Gawthrop, Matthew Harris and others.
The chorus will present Ellingboe’s “Everyone Sang,” which is taken from a Siegfried Sassoon poem of the same title. “He wrote it right after the armistice of World War I was signed. It’s about hearing spontaneous singing breaking out,” Greer said.
Sametz’s “I Have Had Singing,” he said, is a beautiful, poignant, elegiac setting of an epitaph on a stone in an English churchyard that reads “Here I lie. I have had pleasure enough. I have had singing.”
Chatman’s “There Is Sweet Music Here” is a set of four pieces for chorus and oboe. “He writes colorful and atmospheric music,” Greer said.
“Sing Me to Heaven” by Gawthrop is one of the most popular pieces of American choral music of the past 20 years. Greer said he thinks the reason is that “it’s spectacularly beautiful and it’s an original text of his. It’s mournful. It’s like a four-minute requiem about singing someone through death to the other side.”
Harris’ “If Music and the Sweet Poetry Agree” is a group of songs that Greer said are catchy and melodic.
“It’s in a faux-madrigal style based on the poetry of Richard Barnfield. It sounds like an English madrigal, but it was just written three years ago,” he stated.
The paired concerts are Saturday, Oct. 1, at Immanuel Presbyterian Church and Sunday, Oct. 2, at St. John’s United Methodist Church.
These are the other concerts in Quintessence’s 2016-17 season: Nov. 26, Messiah Sing; Dec. 4, Gloria in Excelsis; March 18 and 19, Canciones y Poemas; and May 21, Fantastic & Frivolous.