Little Match Girl

Vox Humana

Brian Wismath, conductor

Corey Rae, Veit Rudhardt: percussion

ZarYevka Ballet

St. Barnabas Anglican Church
March 17, 2013

By Elizabeth Courtney

Sitting in the front pew before the concert began, I had plenty of time to look around at, what was to me, a completely unfamiliar concert venue. A mid sized building with soaring wood columns and a beautifully vaulted wooden apse, a minimal strip of carpet down the centre of two generous wooden stages, the entire altar area surrounded by what looked like a low tile-clad wall, St. Barnabas suggested a promising acoustic environment for an a capella choir such as Vox Humana, with its twelve female and nine male singers.

There are times when a chord or an interval is so arresting, it is forever what you remember about the piece. A moment that opens up with a blinding clarity a whole new level of what music can convey about the human condition. It can happen in a popular song (it happened once in a Kate and Anna Mcgarrigle song, about mad dogs, I believe) ... and it was in pursuit of that mystery that I spent so much time studying classical Indian and Arabic modes. On Sunday afternoon, it happened, not in the centre or towards the end of a piece, but unexpectedly in the opening notes of the introductory "Laudate" by the Norwegian composer, Knut Lystedt. One would expect an invitation to "Praise him" to be enthusiastic, joyful, any number of compelling extravert gestures, yet in the precise sculpting of these three notes, the opening up in the second syllable and the falling away in the "te", director Brian Wismath drew from his singers a profound sense of awed and grateful surprise ... like the sudden intake of a child's breath when he sees the gift he barely dared to hope for.

Wismath's ability to sculpt sound with calligraphic precision without compromising the emotional warmth and rich tonality of his singers, was evident throughout the concert. Bo Hansen's "LIghten My Eyes" opened with a gently mysterious bass met by the excitement of the sopranos, the murmuring of the altos, swelling and fading into the sleep of death, short understated phrases on the word "rejoice" building to a climax penetrated by the clarity of "I will sing unto the Lord", its tender certainty leading to a beautifully quiet conclusion.

Arvo Pärt's meditative invocation of the presence of Christ, above, below, around, within, familiar from the Celtic blessing and the Navaho summons of the Beauty Way, created overlapping layers of sound, each phrase like an artichoke leaf exploding in my mouth, the intensity rising to the dramatic high of "Christ in the heart, the mind, the mouth, the eye of every man", the final statement, the resting place of "Christ With Me" as simple, unadorned and satisfying as the heart of the artichoke itself. The piece is called "The Deer's Cry", something I had not noticed in my program at the time, but which refers to the embedded sense of the deer's sacred place in the web of all life in the Celtic imagination, and reinforces the idea that Pärt, like the British composer, John Tavener, had to endure a period of disenchantment with his own musical tradition, before returning to plainsong, chant and early polyphony to find the roots of a simpler, more universal perception of the potential for meaning in music.

The first half concluded with the relatively light-hearted yet accomplished play on the word "Compassio" in a small work commissioned by the young composer from Victoria, David Archer. By splitting the word for empathy in suffering into its component syllables, which the choir kept airborne like a shuttlecock in an invigorating game of badminton, right to the final dramatic flourish on the last "O", Archer demonstrated that he too is looking for a way to cross the old divides and find a new synthesis: one where joy and suffering, good and evil, harmony and dissonance find their resolution in and with each other.

Having had to miss Vox Humana's presentation of Arvo Pärt's Passio (which I am told was magnificent) the night before, I was particularly looking forward to the major work of the Sunday concert, The Little Match Girl Passion, by David Lang. My seat in the front pew now turned out to be a major disadvantage, however. Lang himself is an eclectic contemporary American composer who has experimented with many musical idioms, and would probably have welcomed the idea of adding dancers to his retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's tale of the little girl who has to sell matches to survive - and whose death on the frozen streets of her town is such an indictment of the cruelty of her father and the obliviousness of her community. Setting it as a Passion, a liturgical form which focusses on the transformational power of the imagination to transcend the darkest of hours, has precedents in the mystery plays for a visual enactment of the chanted or sung version of the narration. Yet in this case, having either the dancers or the choir completely out of view proved, for me at least, a distraction rather than the complement that was intended. The rigid structure of a Church with narrow aisles and straight, fixed pews presented such a challenge to the choreographer that I would have preferred static tableaux from the dancers which did not require constant head turning to see where they were. As it was, I found myself increasingly relieved to experience the full impact of the choir whenever the singers returned to the front as the performance proceeded.

That said, there were many glorious moments. The narrative sections were richly resonant and in the ninth verse, the choir singing "Have mercy" across the aisles to each other had the beautifully ethereal quality of crying souls. In the eleventh verse, the sixth hour (the beginning of the transition into death when darkness covered the land in the biblical version) evoked a dramatically eerie awe, with an increasing intensity in the repetition of Eli ... Eli ... the words of both the little girl and Jesus in their most forsaken moment. The thirteenth verse was pure tintinnabulation - the sound of struck bells - the singers achieving a glimmering-on-the-brink with small syllables, the sound of sheer stuttering terror.

The use of a bass drum and chimes was deeply affecting, evoking the quiet of death, the clink of ice and the beauty of frost as the final verses contrasted the external fact of death with the internal journey of hope experienced by the child in her dying vision of her welcoming grandmother.