The title of the final concert in the 2009–2010 season of the Bay Choral Guild, performed last night at St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church, was Peace and Love, reflecting the fact that the entire program consisted of two works (separated by an intermission), one for each of these topics. Both topics are complex and profound, but more important is that they are intensely intimate. Music can capture that intimacy even when the complexities are elusive, and the Bay Choral Guild has the modest scale most conducive to that intimacy. That scale was well served by St. Gregory's acoustics, so all factors were well situated to do justice to the themes of the evening.
The theme of peace was taken up by Sanford Dole, Artistic Director of the Bay Choral Guild, with The Fabric of Peace, composed on a commission by the Oakland Symphony Chorus and first performed in January of 2009. Love was then represented by Johannes Brahms with a performance of his Opus 52 Liebeslieder waltzes concluding with the last of the Opus 65 Neue Liebeslieder waltz collection. Dole also offered a preview lecture, primarily to provide background about his own composition.
Among those who composed waltzes, particularly in the nineteenth century, Brahms is rather unique. The dance form was a populist one; and the music tended to encourage dancing as an extended pleasure, in sharp contrast with the legacy of dances for nobility packaged in compact binary forms. Brahms, on the other hand, tended to aim for brevity, first in the sixteen waltzes of his Opus 39 collection and then in the two Liebeslieder sets. Each individual waltz aims for an almost haiku-like moment, during which everything unfolds in only a few measures and one or two repeated passages.
The Liebeslieder poems that Brahms set are by George Friedrich Daumer from his collection Polydora. (The final poem of Opus 65 is by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.) One or two of these unfold a narrative; but most of the poems that Brahms selected share his taste for the briefly-stated single impression. Many of those impressions cover a wide variety of metaphors, while a few are unabashedly literal. Opus 52 is not strictly a cycle; but, as had been the case in Opus 39, Brahms created a sense of flow through which each waltz would almost naturally lead to its successor.
The result is less a concert experience and more one of music to be enjoyed among friends. As I suggested when Paul Hersh organized a recital at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that included Opus 52, this is music for the concept of the Schubertiad and the intimacy of its social setting. While a church sanctuary is a far cry from a nineteenth-century salon, Dole and his chorus (along with pianists T. Paul Rosas and Sarah Wannamaker) rather successfully evoked the Schubertiad spirit. Much of this derived from the obvious joy with which the music was presented, but it was further enhanced by a highly personalized approach to the text. It was as if we had been comfortably settled back in a time when reading aloud was a major social practice and we had encountered some friends who wanted to share their favorite poems. Brahms' music created the perfect milieu for the sharing experience; but the "magic" emerged through the delivery within that milieu.
This same "magic" did much to sustain the effectiveness of Dole's own Fabric of Peace cantata. The original conception was a celebration of the themes of community, spirituality, and the sacred; and these were realized through three markedly different text sources. Community was represented by a Rig Veda prayer whose first line is "Let us be united." For spirituality a work by Bay Area poet Elisabeth Eliassen was selected with the title "Song of the Spirit," a reflection on the "Pange lingua" prayer of Thomas Aquinas. For the sacred Dole turned to an excerpt from the "Akethist of Thanksgiving" by Metropolitan Tryphon of Turkistan. In this case the opening line is "Glory to God for all things!" (The exclamation mark is in the text and is used frequently in the excerpted passage.) Dole then added his own celebration of music by including a setting of the (prose) preface that William Byrd wrote for his Psalms, Sonnets and Songs of Sadness and Piety, beginning with the words "The exercise of singing." Dole also included an instrumental "Reverie" that serves somewhat as a reflection on Byrd's thoughts.
Here again the social setting owed much to the priority of sharing these texts with others. The music was there to establish the proper "scene" for each text and reflected the diversity of Dole's appreciation of the repertoire. Most explicit was his decision to allow Byrd to trope on own text with a passage from an eight-voice setting of "Omnis spiritus laudet Dominum." More intriguing was the suggestion of a saudade for Eliassen's text, seeming to recall the evocations of this mood by Darius Milhaud (formerly a member of the Music Faculty at Mills College). Most important, however, was the clarity of the text and the clear commitment to that text that was so obvious in the execution by the performers. This is an ensemble that clearly takes both its music and its texts very seriously and is therefore well equipped to take on major themes like peace and love without either sentimentalizing or trivializing them, and we can all benefit from more performances with this level of attention.
Comments