Maui Choral Arts spring concert Sunday at St Anthony Church in Wailuku
Two acclaimed choral works will receive their Maui premiere on Sunday at St. Anthony Catholic Church when Maui Choral Arts presents their Spring Concert featuring “The World Beloved: A Bluegrass Mass” by Carol Barnett and “A Vision Unfolding” by Kyle Pederson.
Led by director/conductor John Rowehl with collaborative pianist Lotus Dancer, the 60-voice chorus will perform the mass with a bluegrass ensemble featuring Teresa Skinner on violin, Aaron Huisenfeldt on mandolin, Ely Spivack on banjo, Jeremy Savo on guitar, and Patty Pearce on bass. Debuted at Carnegie Hall in 2013, it was originally composed for the VocalEssence Ensemble Singers and the Monroe Crossing bluegrass band.
“Carol Barnett has done a beautiful job of marrying the two styles,” Rowehl explained. “It’s the standard Latin mass form. It has the Kyrie, Gloria, Credo, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei movements, but it’s interspersed with what Barnett calls ballads in three or four verses, and they’re much more kind of vernacular. The beginning and ending movements are just an a capella voice. A couple of movements are in Latin, but the Gloria has a lot of English text and there’s a section where the text is glory be to God below and then it talks about all these manifestations of Godliness in the world around us, the mountains, the oceans, the seas. And so it’s the religious form, but inflected through a modern folk vernacular.” Adding the novel bluegrass element helps invigorate the mass. “People who grew up in a religious tradition where the mass is common will of course recognize it, but people who don’t I think will find this really accessible, and it’s just so fun and lively,” said Rowehl. “The Sanctus gets into this groove and Barnett said it’s not lugubrious, staid religious music, it’s just full of toe-tapping fun.”
Pederson’s “A Vision Unfolding” is a newer work, published last year. He was commissioned by seven choirs to write an extended work centered on themes of social justice.
“I was thinking about repertoire for the Spring concert and I was talking with one of the singers who said, ‘I feel like what the world needs right now is something to bring us together. It’s going to be a hard election year and there’s all this tension and divisiveness in the world. Can we find something that sort of is an antidote?’ I was thrilled to discover this brand new work by Kyle Peterson that exactly fit the bill. It’s a nice balance to the mass. This piece is warm and enveloping, and it just gives you a big hug, but it’s got some fun elements with spoken word poetry interspersed between all the movements.”
The poetry will be delivered on Sunday by Elizabeth Fellows, Scott McLelland, Ricky Jones, Hoku Pavao Jones, Lenita Witherspoon, and Francis Taua. Also, Rowehl invited Kumu Hula Sissy Lake-Farm to create hula to interpret three of the work’s five movements. She will be joined by her Hālau Makana Aloha O Ka Laua‘e, and she invited Aunty Iola Balubar and the St. Anthony’s Church Ladies of Hui O Lama Kukui to offer sacred gesture in the final choral movement, a setting of the famous Langston Hughes poem, and the inspiration for the concert’s title, “I Dream a World.”
“I talked with Sissy Lake-Farm about whether she’d ever done hula with non-Hawaiian choral music?, said Rowehl. “Could she see that fitting? She was like, ‘yes, let’s do it.’ I am all about combining styles in a respectful way, and I feel with Sissy as the partner, that’s what’s going to happen.”
The Maui Choral Arts Spring Concert is presented on Sunday at 2 p.m. Tickets are $35 and $20 for students, all general admission. They are available for purchased online at mauichoral.org or at the door. The box office will open at 1:15, and doors open at 1:30.