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Alix Goolden Performance Hall
March 28, 2014
"I have found equal inspiration from strict form or unbridled chaos; tonality, modality or post-tonality; and lyricism, pointillism or minimalism—I find it crucial to have as sweeping a palette of creative possibilities at my disposal as possible...The challenge therefore, is to ride this wave of self-proclaimed eclecticism with sincerity, individuality and spontaneity, writing music that speaks to the human condition" Julian Wachner.
The seven composers featured on this programme to complement the title work by the Hungarian composer György Ligeti, born in the 20th century between 1923 and 1969, have all in their way addressed the challenge posed by the horrors unleashed in this most violent of times by forsaking the forms, both classic and post modern, of the academies, exploring folk, global and early sacred music to address in a new way the great questions which face humanity. I experienced the whole evening as a shimmering fractal witness in sound of the very moment when the old passes away and the elements of the new dance in dissonant waves and clouds which can be understood as viscerally true, yet still ephemeral, transitional, hauntingly beautiful.
The programme opened with a suite of poems, by e.e.cummings set to music by the younget composer, Julian Wachner, born in 1969, titled Sometimes I feel Alive. Fragments of tantalising text (moon sole) swam like fish in overlapping phrases, dramatic percussive passages, rising intensities dropping back into 'flutter, flutter into dust.' Then a shift of tone for 'but the sea does not change', a meditative interlude ending with the astonishing image in 'not even the rain has such small hands', so gorgeous that when I got home I looked up the poems. And immediately needed to hear the music again as the poems are such deeply felt and subtly expressed evocations of love, I wanted to experience them wedded to sound as Wachner did. The translations that were provided in the programme were probably less necessary (being of more familiar liturgical texts) than these English language poems - but the takeaway is my renewed appreciation for e.e.cummings, to say nothing of the pleasure of discovering Julian Wachner, and that a CD of his choral music is available on the Naxos label.
The next piece, the first of two Ave Marias by the composer, Rihards Dubra, born in Latvia in 1964, was a small four line gem, its slower than slow invocation of Ave Maria, rising in the quiet joy of Gratia plena, to a thrilling climax on Jesus, gently returning to rest in Sancta Maria, the Amen repeating that exquisite cadence - the whole as satisfying as the rise and fall of one wave on the beach.
This was followed by another crystallised moment with Totus Tuus from the Polish composer Henryk Gorecki. It is hard to imagine a more complete statement of the surrender of oneself to a beloved than this “I am utterly yours” - on a par with the profoundest of outpouring from mystics of any tradition. After the full bodied address to Maria, the oft repeated Munda Maria came to feel like the earth herself. The breathing out of Maria, the innerness of totus tuus, a river of self giving in music, an emptying out till by the final note, nothing was left. In the silence that followed, it seemed almost sacrilegious to applaud.
Brian Wismath, in introducing the audience to the main event, Ligeti's Lux Aeterna, did us the great favour of having the choir demonstrate one simple row of tones in unison so that we might have a small island of familiarity to take into the experience, and then invited us to close our eyes and relax. Good advice, for like Kubrick's film which relied on visual imagery and very little speech, and was more about an exploration of the mystery of the great arc of evolution of mankind, this music, sung with extraordinary precision and commitment by the choir, created a profusion, a tangle, a thicket of creeping tonal increments, sometimes smoothing into a stream, tenors and bases rumbling, altos sighing and sopranos occasionally screaming like gulls in a gale force wind, that it felt like an unmediated brain massage, ending with a hum in a great silence. In a way which defies explanation, it was like being rewired in readiness for something completely new and unimagined. That the choir was ready and able to take on such a challenging composition, and deliver it with such unfaltering confidence is a testament to everyone involved, and it was certainly a very appreciative audience.
After the intermission, the sound of gloriously deep basses in the Russian composer, Alfred Schnittke's Drei Geistliche Gesange brought us back to more familiar territory. Dramatic architectural structures and rich tones contrasting with delicately clear and open sounds. Then the second Ave Maria from Rihards Dubra was as gracefully gorgeous as the first.
The little known work by Arvo Pärt came as a surprise. The text of Dopo La Vittoria was taken, word for word, from a historical dictionary of church singers in a commission from the city of Milan to commemorate the joint contribution of the Saints Ambrose and Augustine to the Mass. It called to mind the somewhat similar idea of the mediaeval Cantigas which celebrated all the miracles, probable or improbable, associated with the Virgin Mary, in a rollicking and vastly entertaining popular format. With a very different tone, this unlikely text, in Pärt's hands nevertheless shared the powerful narrative flow, a feeling of being wrapped in a story like a piece of the Bayeux Tapestry (chronicling the Norman invasion of England) in which the names of Augustino or Ambrosio rang out from time to time like reassuringly familiar beacons, the final amen like the toast at the end of a meal with warm and friendly strangers.
Forming the centrepiece of his six part meditation on Love, Beauty and Desire, Vancouver composer Rodney Sharman's setting of an ode by Ovid on the power of love evokes the forces of fire, air, earth and water, striving in chaos, their natural discord only reconcilable by love, the source of harmony. The elements are all equally powerful and the choir conveyed them with rich sonorities and beautiful dynamics, the resolution of discord resolving in a harmony in which a sustained bass note came as quiet as a kiss. Again, I have found a composer I want to hear more of - starting with the other five parts of this composition with its beautiful poems.
The programme concluded with a piece the choir has already recorded, Summer Rain by the Estonian composer Toivo Tulev. The female voices sounding like plucked strings over the warm texture of the male voices created a brooding melancholy, scraps of meaning like textile fragments ... 'behold iniquity', 'Jerusalem'...emerging out of the memerising soundscape. Long after I had left the auditorium, feeling, appropriately enough, that I had returned from another planet, that precise and beautiful plucking rang on in my ears.
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