<> ARRESTING CONTEMPORARY SACRED-CHORAL OPUSES
A Wealth of
European Imports
By Paul Hertelendy
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
and dance
Week of March 29-April 6, 2010
Vol. 12, No. 83
For those
souls convinced that sacred-music composition waned badly a century
ago,
Sanford Dole has a revelation.
And for those
souls convinced that sacred choral concerts never materialize very
close to
feasts like Christmas and Easter, Dole unreeled a whole evening of it
right at
the start of Holy Week before a standing-room-only crowd March 28.
The
Sanford
Dole Ensemble marches to a different drummer. It gives only a couple of
concerts a year, with an all-contemporary sacred program (I mean, we
don’t
really need yet another chorus doing “Messiah,” do we?). And the
enterprising
Dole spotlights works often beating well-heeled arts groups to the
punch, like
James MacMillan’s profound, hour-long “Seven Last Words from the
Cross,” which
Dole believed to constitute a Bay Area premiere.
Dole’s
two
dozen singers include various professional soloists. The chorus clearly
is his
pride and joy, while his string orchestra sounds as though its
rehearsals were notable
mainly for wholescale personnel absenteeism.
MacMillan,
a 50-year-old Scot, writes in a distinctive style of his own, with only
a
slight tinge of Benjamin Britten’s persona. He can be by turns
celestial with
rich harmonies as two altos intone “Thou shalt be with me in paradise,”
or
passionate, as the chorus gives the full-voiced repetitions of “Woman,
behold
Thy Son!”
Hammering
blows, perhaps suggesting the nailing to the cross, mark the unsettling
“It is
finished’ section, with high voices doing an upside-down pedal point,
while the
melodies develop in the inner voices.
What
I like
best about MacMillan’s music is his ability to swath his sounds in a
veil---wispy, elusive, even disorienting. Something like the British
countryman
J.M.W. Turner’s misty paintings.
A
young
English talent to watch is fast-rising Tarik O’Regan, whose “Triptych”
incorporates
a great measure of both contour and momentum. He brings on generous
overlays of
voices and a restless orchestra, for instance in Biblical
passages on people dwelling together
in unity---harmonious, but with a sense of jostling in tight quarters.
The
snippets of text from many sources, including the 13th-century
poet
Rumi, are all-embracing, offering a peace-on-earth consoling message.
The
concert
also featured the Berlin Mass, one of the most predictable musical
forays by the
74-year-old Estonian Arvo Pärt. Written mostly in 1991, it was the
oldest work
on the slate. Pärt has his chorus sing up and down on the notes of
a major
triad (similar to the opening of the carol “Christ Was Born on
Christmas Day”),
avoiding the others as though they were works of the devil. Done in
Latin, it
lumbers along in formulaic modernist style.
The
chorus
is a highly disciplined professional one, venturing into demanding
repertory.
The
concert
was given at St. Gregory of Nyssa Church,
a jewel box of
quasi-Byzantine-mosaic wall décor, where
Dole is choral director. In addition, he leads the leads the Bay Choral
Guild
in Palo Alto.
Sanford
Dole Ensemble, at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, San Francisco,
March 28. For SDE info: (415)
254-1787, or go online.
©Paul Hertelendy 2010
#
Paul Hertelendy has been
covering
the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with
relish
-- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never
weakly)
will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with
forays
into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local
artists as well.
#
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