As we prepare for the most significant presidential inauguration in recent memory, a fact made more resonant by the concurrent celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr Day, I find myself returning to what I call music of conscience--music that connects with historical issues, that raises awareness, that gives voice to the silenced, that remembers, that honors, that refuses to yield to the anesthetizing pull of the tides that would drown those voices. I have been working with our Young Singers Project singers on a challenging program of American Choral music called "How Can I keep from singing?" The title song of the program is a beloved Quaker hymn, and still a favorite in the Peace-church tradition (the protestant churches--Quaker, Amish, Brethren & Mennonite--that have been abolitionist and pacifist for centuries). The program also features settings of canonical American poets like Dickinson, Sandburg, and Frost, by Barber, Glass, and Thompson, respectively. In addition to other hymn settings by Alice Parker and Aaron Copland, the program's final sections are devoted to the spirituals of William Dawson and the music of our pre-eminent African-American composer, Adolphus Hailstork. One of Dolph's most beloved choral works is "A Carol for All Children." Setting an original poem, this "Carol" is a beautiful prayer resembling a lullaby, wishing love, joy, and peace for the children and the world they inhabit. We are also offering one of Hailstork's most gripping a capella works, "Crucifixion." Indebted to the traditions of the Black church, this work is a series of variations on the spiritual "He never said a mumblin' word" --a series that add up to an intense and moving, wholly original composition.
I had the pleasure and honor of hearing my colleague, Carl Haywood, director of choral activities at Norfolk State University, as guest organist at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday service at Christ and St Luke's Episcopal Church in Norfolk. Following "Lift every voice and Sing" Dr Haywood played a rousing set of variations on "We shall overcome." Following church, I listened again to Hailstork's moving elegy to Dr King, "Epitaph," watched the opening Inauguration events at the Lincoln memorial, marveled on the historic circle connecting Lincoln to King to Obama, and began to create a playlist called "Music of Conscience."
Joining the Hailstork elegy and the choral works mentioned above on my (personal, subjecive) playlist are (thus far) about 11 additional hours of challenging, engaging, sometimes difficult, always affecting music written to oppose injustice, oppression, violence and to honor the memory of martyrs like Dr King and those whose names most of us will never know.
Yesterday, the MET, a beloved cultural institution whose reputation does not rest on contemporary, consciousness-raising operas, broadcast one of the most topical new works in the classical music world, "Doctor Atomic." John Adams is one of the most important voices in music today, and this is in no small part because of his cutting-edge operas. Adams' early music was indebted to the minimalist music of composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich. While traces of that concentrated, repetitive & hypnotic style remain, Adams' music is entirely his own, assimilating techniques of modernism with tradition into a style that sounds like, well, Adams. His first two operas tackled politically challenging topics, and his courage in dealing with complex, even controversial subjects hasn't dimmed. I think it is a telling symptom of our political pusillanimity where "engaged art" is concerned that his opera on the murder of a Jewish American by Palestinian terrorists, "The Death of Klinghoffer" has not received a full production in the US since its creation. It has been criticized for painting "sympathetic" portraits of terrorists. Never mind that both sides are given equal voice, nowhere more tellingly than in the respective "Chorus of Exiled Jews" and "Chorus of Exiled Palestinians." Adams, not initially a vocal composer, has found a groove for writing effective, dramatic music for both voices and chorus. Thus it is poetic justice, following the cancellation of a production of "Klinghoffer" shortly after 9/11 (political sensitivities), that he was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for a 9/11 memorial piece. "On the Transmigration of Souls" won three Grammy's and has become one of several major works by this composer to vie for the canon of great 21st century scores. "Doctor Atomic" concerns the making of THE bomb, and centers on its creator, Robert Oppenheimer. The opera works on one level as a documentary narrative on the making and testing of the bomb, on another as a character study of Oppenheimer (and his circle), and on a metaphysical level as an existentialist meditation (but isn't that the subject/purpose of all art? To give/create/question meaning?)
Adams has written a dramatic oratorio called "El Niño" which is both a traditional Christmas story and a window into Latin American culture, including memorial tributes to victims of political and military crimes. The recording of the oratorio is especially memorable because of the singing of the late mezzo soprano, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, whose distinguishing timbre, dramatic sense, and visceral engagement give a movingly human voice to the Spanish poems set in the oratorio.
Another distinct voice on the contemporary classical scene, and one even more beholden to Latin American "Liberation Theology" that connects faith to oppression and injustice (and therefore, to action and social justice) is the Scottish composer, James MacMillan. Both a personal and critical favorite, MacMillan's music combines a keen dramatic sense with elements of chant, the Anglican tradition, and indigenous music of his own country (Scottish laments: notated "cries" and "sighs" figure prominently). I have a disc that features two of his major choral scores, "The Seven Last Words" and the "Cantos Sagrados." The former is a haunting series of variations on Passion-tide texts that particularizes the drama of one of the holiest of Christian observances, Good Friday, while simultaneously universalizing the drama's subject of suffering, martyrdom, and collective grief. "Cantos Sagrados" is even more closely aligned with Liberation Theology's tenets of justice for the oppressed, and reinforces this by juxtaposing contemporary Latin American poems with the sacred liturgical texts. Both scores are challenging and demanding for listener and performer alike yet are immediate in their emotional & spiritual appeal. Like much great art, regardless of genre or subject, these works "work" on many levels, and are even more rewarding for the participant willing to invest in their worlds. The Virginia Chorale will include one of MacMillan's shorter works, "A Child's Prayer" in its Anniversary concerts April 18 & 19. This haunting, a capella communion hymn comes from the world of the Passion-tide "Seven Last Words" and is a memorial tribute to the victims of the Dunblane tragedy, one of the first instances of serial-killer gun violence in the UK (in this case, an elementary school in Scotland). Overtop a chordal foundation of steady, yet brooding harmonies, MacMillan writes a chant-like duet for two trebles, evoking the pure sound of children's voices. The choir takes up a typical MacMillan texture of imitative, Scottish-lament-inflected lines before the ethereal duet returns to close this moving elegy.
And I will close this rambling entry for now, but will return with more about the subject of this subject line, Benjamin Britten, and some of the great body of music written to commemorate "war...and the pity of war..."
Sunday, January 18, 2009
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Roberto Bolaño: "dirty, poorly dressed, and filled with love"
I have just finished reading Roberto Bolaño's sprawling and concentrated, epic and contemporary novel, 2666. Over 1100 pages in the original Spanish, the new translation comes in at just under 900 pages, and is the remarkable swan-song of the Chilean poet, novelist, and provocateur who died in 2003 at age 50. Bolaño's biography and the astonishing output of fiction of his final decade have taken the English-speaking literary world by storm (6 novels, two of them epic in proportion, and a collection of short stories). An anti-establishment poet, jailed (like many of his contemporaries) after Pinochet's coup of 1973 (look it up, kids: on September 11, no less) he is just coming to our attention. The first of these epic novels, "The Savage Detectives" (1998) appeared in English in 2007 and was heralded as one of the best books of the year. It is a wild, 700-page ride chronicling the exploits of two "visceral realist" poets, autobiographical characters based on the author and his friend, comrade & co-conspirator, Mario Santiago. In real life Bolaño & Santiago called themselves "infra-realists," rejected the literary and political establishments, read avant-garde writers of all periods (from French Symbolism to Surrealism to Kafka to Sci-fi) and were the literary revolutionaries of their day, disrupting readings of writers they opposed (both for their literature and their politics). With the posthumous publication of his magnum opus, "2666" (itself one of the notable books of 2008) Bolaño has been established as THE major Latin American writer of his generation, and the most important voice to appear on that scene since the "Boom" (the generation of writers led by Gabriel Garcia Marquez--"Love in the time of Cholera" and "100 Years of Solitude" among other fables known for their "magic realism"--and one of many writers Bolaño & co. rejected).
His style is difficult to succinctly describe. He can be a fast-paced storyteller, writing a page-turner mystery or action tale. His voice is of his time, and its contemporaneousness is a distinguishing feature for so literary a writer. Indeed, the writing is a dense labyrinth of references and allusions, metaphors and allegories, and the more well-read one is, the more one gets the references to writers and artists, the artist's life, and the creative process itself. Yet one needn't be a Renaissance-type reader to get Bolaño: the writing is challenging and entertaining, provocative and ruminative, at times gritty, even raunchy (films of his novels would be rated R), and at turns utterly romantic and poetic. I can't remember having such a range of reactions to a work of fiction--Bolaño's writing spans the gamut of human emotions, responses and pursuits. It is alternatively laugh-out-loud funny, morally exacting, riveting as a thriller, and dense as graduate seminars on literary criticism or philosophy.
"The Savage Detectives" is laid out in three panoramic sections. The first and last relate the story of the two "visceral realist" poets and their exploits in Mexico: literary, political, social, sexual in a distinct Latin American voice that is beholden to the poet's own journey from Chile to Mexico to Spain in the late 20th century--a distinguishing characteristic from the voices of the Boom (more beholden to the 19th century European novel, to oversimplify to the point of insulting all the involved parties). The middle section of the novel is a dizzying collection of short stories told in first-person perspectives from an array of characters, locations and years (Mexico, France, Italy, Austria, and among others, Israel, from 1976 to 1996). The last section gives the novel its name, brings the narrative from the first section to some sort of conclusion, and eerily (if opaquely) foreshadows the "vanishing point" of his final novel, "2666."
That focal point is the Sonora Desert of Mexico, where in the real-world Cuidad Juarez, hundreds of women were murdered in still-unsolved cases (an expose of the crimes can be found on Amnesty International's site). Bolaño calls his border town Santa Teresa (there are allusions to Saints throughout the epic novel), and it is a common denominator in the 5 separate novellas that make up "2666"--a point of no return, a literal and symbolic cemetery. Another common denominator is the novel's mysterious protagonist, the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi. The name itself is a cryptic allusion to the Renaissance Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And in that connection lies one of the seeds of Bolaño's genius. Natasha Wimmer, translator of both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" talks of Bolaño's fascination with detectives. The intersection in these stories between the unravelling of mysteries and the life of artists (especially writers), and the author's knack for weaving between these worlds while concurrently entangling them in layers of significance is but one of Bolaño's distinguishing marks. I would like to think he'd be pleased that this reader's curiosity was piqued enough to investigate--like a cultural detective-- references from the novels' characters & settings.
The novel's first section "The Part about the Critics" introduces us to this writer, Archimboldi, who is a cult favorite among the European literary cognoscenti. The French critic, Pelletier, the Spaniard Espinoza, and the Italian Morini share an obsession with both their nobel-prize-hopeful-author, and his unlikely pre-eminent British advocate, Liz Norton. I don't know another writer who manages to weave a love rectangle around a dense tale of that most erotic of fields, literary criticism. Among the other cast of fascinating characters are a self-mutilating artist, critics from Serbia & Swabia, and a Pakistani taxi driver who figures in one of the most topical (& unsettling) episodes in this opening novella. The critics end their search for Archimboldi (so reclusive, none of his critics, biographers, or readers have ever met him) in Mexico where they meet the fascinatingly unbalanced professor Amalfitano. The second "Part about Amalfitano" chronicles this curious character, his estranged wife, their daughter, and the voice(s) inside his head. The third "Part about Fate" follows an African-American journalist as he faces his mother's untimely death, interviews a founder of the Black Panthers, and is then sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match after his Harlem magazine's sports-writer is murdered. While in Santa Teresa, among other adventures, he falls for Rosa Amalfitano, and hears more about the mysterious murders of women that have been happening around the maquiladora factories in this city on the Mexico-US border. The central section, "The Part about the Crimes" at nearly 300 pages alone, is the longest, densest and most difficult section of the novel. It chronicles, with documentary attention to detail, the murders of young women. I found myself asking, on more than one occasion, "what kind of man writes these kinds of gruesome details, page after page, of violent crimes committed against women?" The "Crimes" follow one another in pithy, biographical sketches of the victims, their families, the circumstances and details surrounding them, and the suspects (if any). These episodes are occasionally interrupted with other characters that connect us to a sense of time & place already established, even if the narrative connection is tenuous. One of the obvious answers to the question I posed about this section is the same answer to any question about dredging up the grisly details about any kind of "hate crime"--to tell the truth, to give voice to the silenced ("poetry exists so that the dead may speak" said a more poetic voice than mine), and to open eyes and ears to the ugliness many would just as soon ignore, avoid, or smooth-over. This dynamic is harrowingly paralleled in a central story from the final "Part about Archimboldi." This final novella tells the fascinating story of the making of Archimboldi. Without revealing plot details the curious reader will want to discover unassisted, Archimboldi is a soldier in the Nazi Army. While interned in an allied camp, he hears a first-hand story about one episode of atrocities that contributed to the Holocaust. The connection of the Polish town where those crimes occurred is not explicitly linked to Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi is headed as the novel ends. It doesn't have to be. Nor does it need tout itself as "historical fiction" to resonate so palpably with atrocities from the Holocaust to the "disappeared" of Latin America. This tour de force also works as a meditation on the mysterious makings of an artist, and the stories and lives--real and imagined--such an individual spins into being.
This enthralling, dizzying, disturbing, provocative, fascinating, entertaining, and allegorical tome might be the best epic novel of its time. The title of my essay on my new favorite author comes from one of his poems, titled "Dirty, Poorly Dressed." Featured in the Poetry magazine of last November, it is from his collection, "The Romantic Dogs" and ends with an autobiographical, artistic credo that applies to any and all of his works:
Only fever and poetry provoke visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these paths or these plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until at last my soul came upon my heart.
It was sick, it's true, but it was alive.
The cryptic title of his last literary testament, 2666, is alluded to in one of Bolaño's earlier novella's "Amulet" as his executor illustrates in 2666's afterword: "more like a cemetery...not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968...but a cemetery in 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
His style is difficult to succinctly describe. He can be a fast-paced storyteller, writing a page-turner mystery or action tale. His voice is of his time, and its contemporaneousness is a distinguishing feature for so literary a writer. Indeed, the writing is a dense labyrinth of references and allusions, metaphors and allegories, and the more well-read one is, the more one gets the references to writers and artists, the artist's life, and the creative process itself. Yet one needn't be a Renaissance-type reader to get Bolaño: the writing is challenging and entertaining, provocative and ruminative, at times gritty, even raunchy (films of his novels would be rated R), and at turns utterly romantic and poetic. I can't remember having such a range of reactions to a work of fiction--Bolaño's writing spans the gamut of human emotions, responses and pursuits. It is alternatively laugh-out-loud funny, morally exacting, riveting as a thriller, and dense as graduate seminars on literary criticism or philosophy.
"The Savage Detectives" is laid out in three panoramic sections. The first and last relate the story of the two "visceral realist" poets and their exploits in Mexico: literary, political, social, sexual in a distinct Latin American voice that is beholden to the poet's own journey from Chile to Mexico to Spain in the late 20th century--a distinguishing characteristic from the voices of the Boom (more beholden to the 19th century European novel, to oversimplify to the point of insulting all the involved parties). The middle section of the novel is a dizzying collection of short stories told in first-person perspectives from an array of characters, locations and years (Mexico, France, Italy, Austria, and among others, Israel, from 1976 to 1996). The last section gives the novel its name, brings the narrative from the first section to some sort of conclusion, and eerily (if opaquely) foreshadows the "vanishing point" of his final novel, "2666."
That focal point is the Sonora Desert of Mexico, where in the real-world Cuidad Juarez, hundreds of women were murdered in still-unsolved cases (an expose of the crimes can be found on Amnesty International's site). Bolaño calls his border town Santa Teresa (there are allusions to Saints throughout the epic novel), and it is a common denominator in the 5 separate novellas that make up "2666"--a point of no return, a literal and symbolic cemetery. Another common denominator is the novel's mysterious protagonist, the reclusive German writer Benno von Archimboldi. The name itself is a cryptic allusion to the Renaissance Italian painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo. And in that connection lies one of the seeds of Bolaño's genius. Natasha Wimmer, translator of both "The Savage Detectives" and "2666" talks of Bolaño's fascination with detectives. The intersection in these stories between the unravelling of mysteries and the life of artists (especially writers), and the author's knack for weaving between these worlds while concurrently entangling them in layers of significance is but one of Bolaño's distinguishing marks. I would like to think he'd be pleased that this reader's curiosity was piqued enough to investigate--like a cultural detective-- references from the novels' characters & settings.
The novel's first section "The Part about the Critics" introduces us to this writer, Archimboldi, who is a cult favorite among the European literary cognoscenti. The French critic, Pelletier, the Spaniard Espinoza, and the Italian Morini share an obsession with both their nobel-prize-hopeful-author, and his unlikely pre-eminent British advocate, Liz Norton. I don't know another writer who manages to weave a love rectangle around a dense tale of that most erotic of fields, literary criticism. Among the other cast of fascinating characters are a self-mutilating artist, critics from Serbia & Swabia, and a Pakistani taxi driver who figures in one of the most topical (& unsettling) episodes in this opening novella. The critics end their search for Archimboldi (so reclusive, none of his critics, biographers, or readers have ever met him) in Mexico where they meet the fascinatingly unbalanced professor Amalfitano. The second "Part about Amalfitano" chronicles this curious character, his estranged wife, their daughter, and the voice(s) inside his head. The third "Part about Fate" follows an African-American journalist as he faces his mother's untimely death, interviews a founder of the Black Panthers, and is then sent to Mexico to report on a boxing match after his Harlem magazine's sports-writer is murdered. While in Santa Teresa, among other adventures, he falls for Rosa Amalfitano, and hears more about the mysterious murders of women that have been happening around the maquiladora factories in this city on the Mexico-US border. The central section, "The Part about the Crimes" at nearly 300 pages alone, is the longest, densest and most difficult section of the novel. It chronicles, with documentary attention to detail, the murders of young women. I found myself asking, on more than one occasion, "what kind of man writes these kinds of gruesome details, page after page, of violent crimes committed against women?" The "Crimes" follow one another in pithy, biographical sketches of the victims, their families, the circumstances and details surrounding them, and the suspects (if any). These episodes are occasionally interrupted with other characters that connect us to a sense of time & place already established, even if the narrative connection is tenuous. One of the obvious answers to the question I posed about this section is the same answer to any question about dredging up the grisly details about any kind of "hate crime"--to tell the truth, to give voice to the silenced ("poetry exists so that the dead may speak" said a more poetic voice than mine), and to open eyes and ears to the ugliness many would just as soon ignore, avoid, or smooth-over. This dynamic is harrowingly paralleled in a central story from the final "Part about Archimboldi." This final novella tells the fascinating story of the making of Archimboldi. Without revealing plot details the curious reader will want to discover unassisted, Archimboldi is a soldier in the Nazi Army. While interned in an allied camp, he hears a first-hand story about one episode of atrocities that contributed to the Holocaust. The connection of the Polish town where those crimes occurred is not explicitly linked to Santa Teresa, where Archimboldi is headed as the novel ends. It doesn't have to be. Nor does it need tout itself as "historical fiction" to resonate so palpably with atrocities from the Holocaust to the "disappeared" of Latin America. This tour de force also works as a meditation on the mysterious makings of an artist, and the stories and lives--real and imagined--such an individual spins into being.
This enthralling, dizzying, disturbing, provocative, fascinating, entertaining, and allegorical tome might be the best epic novel of its time. The title of my essay on my new favorite author comes from one of his poems, titled "Dirty, Poorly Dressed." Featured in the Poetry magazine of last November, it is from his collection, "The Romantic Dogs" and ends with an autobiographical, artistic credo that applies to any and all of his works:
Only fever and poetry provoke visions.
Only love and memory.
Not these paths or these plains.
Not these labyrinths.
Until at last my soul came upon my heart.
It was sick, it's true, but it was alive.
The cryptic title of his last literary testament, 2666, is alluded to in one of Bolaño's earlier novella's "Amulet" as his executor illustrates in 2666's afterword: "more like a cemetery...not a cemetery in 1974 or 1968...but a cemetery in 2666, a forgotten cemetery under the eyelid of a corpse or an unborn child, bathed in the dispassionate fluids of an eye that tried so hard to forget one particular thing that it ended up forgetting everything else."
Sunday, January 4, 2009
Opera at/in the movies: 2 Toscas & a Valkyrie
Movie-going opera buffs have had multiple opportunities to celebrate this season, the advent of the Met HD broadcasts notwithstanding. I waded patiently through Bryan Singers' latest film, "Valkyrie," starring Tom Cruise as the treasonous anti-Fascist Nazi officer, Colonel Stauffenberg. "Valkyrie" is named after the eponymous mythological warrior daughters of the gods, and is the name of Wagner's most famous opera, the second installment in his epic tetralogy, "The Ring of the Nibelungs." "The Ride of the Valkyries" is the most famous excerpt from the opera (and whether or not you recognize the title, you've heard the music--in films like "Apocalypse Now" and, with bemused apologies to Richard & family, cartoons like Bugs Bunny--"kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit..."). It appears in the film soundtrack as a clever plot device: Stauffenberg's children are playing a version of war while the old victrola plays the record. A bomb siren sounds, the family retreats to the basement, the record skips, and after a few unnerving explosions, the record skips to the "Ride of the Valkyries" which prompts an epiphany from Cruise's character and determines the (ultimately failed) plot to assassinate Hitler. "Valkyrie" is the name of the military plan to be implemented in the event of the Fuhrer's death or incapacitation, involving a reserve army assuming power and executing orders in the name of the regime. Stauffenberg and his circle of plotters rewrite Valkyrie surreptitiously as a crucial component to their risky & complicated plan. In one of the most memorable scenes in the film, Stauffenberg meets Hitler, hoping to obtain the Fuhrer's signature on the secretly revised plan. Hitler describes the Valkyries as the mythological warriors who mysteriously determine which soldiers deserve a noble death, and cryptically states that "one cannot understand National Socialism without understanding the Valkyries."
[Momentary digression for serendipity: As I am writing this, my local NPR station, WHRO, is playing "Ride of the Valkyries" and reminding listeners our esteemed regional orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, will be playing a program of the same name next weekend, featuring Lorin Maazel's arrangement of orchestral music from the "Ring" cycle. This is music that begs to be experienced live, so I hope Hampton Roads readers will go support the VSO and enjoy an evening of powerful music unlike any other.]
"Tosca" has played important roles in two very different films this season, "Quantum of Solace" and "Milk." The salient characteristic these two films share is how much more engaging they are than "Valkyrie." Both James Bond and Harvey Milk attend live performances of the opera, and that is where the comparison ends. The Bond film, unsurprisingly, requires no prior knowledge of the opera, though the dramatic irony inherent in the co-opted "Te Deum" scene adds a layer of meaning to the action film (the villainous baron, Scarpia, sings of his rapacious lust for the heroine in a blasphemous scene underpinned by the choir & choristers singing the most liturgical of canticles). "Tosca" serves as a foil to the movie's action, as Bond attempts to break into the plot of his arch-rival, having stolen an ear-bud the villains are using to secretly broker a deal during the opera. We half expect Daniel Craig to steal a costume and appear on stage to disrupt both opera and plot, but after some back-stage combat, Craig's deliciously smug Bond trumps the plotters and causes their abrupt exit as Act one of Tosca comes to a more eventful close than is usually the case.
"Tosca" appears throughout the excellent (if uneven) film "Milk," as the title character (brilliantly portrayed by Sean Penn, reaffirming his status as the greatest actor of his generation), listens to his favorite opera. One of the appealing aspects of Puccini's music is the immediacy of its emotional character (interestingly, this is the bane of his music's existence for his many critics...but that's another story!). Thus, one need not recognize "E lucevan le stelle," the hero's aria near the end of his life--and therefore his relationship with his lover, Tosca--to hear it as a lament. The plaintive clarinet solo which presages this most passionate of tenor scenas is obviously tragic. But to know that Cavaradossi is singing of the memory of the "sweet kisses, the languid caresses" while Scott Smith (beautifully portrayed by James Franco) leaves his lover, Harvey Milk, was enough to make this opera queen cry. I know I'm not the only opera buff who immediately recognized the plangent tone of Giuseppe di Steffano (who died in 2008), in one of opera's ultimate cult classic recordings, featuring the muse of the opera queens, Maria Callas. But I digress. I don't know Gus Van Sant's operatic pedigree, but based on this film, I am impressed.
The night before he dies, in the panoramic, multi-layered penultimate scene, Milk attends a performance of "Tosca" at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, one of the world's great opera houses. We see him take in the opera's final, shockingly violent moments, as Tosca realizes the "staged' execution of her lover was real, so rather than fleeing Rome with a safe passage to political asylum, Cavaradossi is dead, thus she flings herself from the parapet of the Castel Sant' Angelo, making her violent death the ultimate act in the opera. That "Milk" is as much political documentary as narrative film & biopic, therefore rendering suspense moot, in no way detracts from the affecting gravity of Milk's last night at the opera. This poignancy is reinforced by the final, slow-motion image from this exquisitely shot scene, where Milk's assassin, Dan White (an exceptional supporting turn by Josh Brolin) shoots him at point blank range, and the final image flashing before Milk's eyes are none other than the banners for Tosca, waving outside the Opera House, across the street from his City Hall office. I don't know if I've committed a sin in film criticism by divulging such details, but I know I would see the film again, for the above- mentioned scenes, for the relevance & importance of the film's subject, and the exceptional performances of James Franco and Sean Penn.
[Momentary digression for serendipity: As I am writing this, my local NPR station, WHRO, is playing "Ride of the Valkyries" and reminding listeners our esteemed regional orchestra, the Virginia Symphony, will be playing a program of the same name next weekend, featuring Lorin Maazel's arrangement of orchestral music from the "Ring" cycle. This is music that begs to be experienced live, so I hope Hampton Roads readers will go support the VSO and enjoy an evening of powerful music unlike any other.]
"Tosca" has played important roles in two very different films this season, "Quantum of Solace" and "Milk." The salient characteristic these two films share is how much more engaging they are than "Valkyrie." Both James Bond and Harvey Milk attend live performances of the opera, and that is where the comparison ends. The Bond film, unsurprisingly, requires no prior knowledge of the opera, though the dramatic irony inherent in the co-opted "Te Deum" scene adds a layer of meaning to the action film (the villainous baron, Scarpia, sings of his rapacious lust for the heroine in a blasphemous scene underpinned by the choir & choristers singing the most liturgical of canticles). "Tosca" serves as a foil to the movie's action, as Bond attempts to break into the plot of his arch-rival, having stolen an ear-bud the villains are using to secretly broker a deal during the opera. We half expect Daniel Craig to steal a costume and appear on stage to disrupt both opera and plot, but after some back-stage combat, Craig's deliciously smug Bond trumps the plotters and causes their abrupt exit as Act one of Tosca comes to a more eventful close than is usually the case.
"Tosca" appears throughout the excellent (if uneven) film "Milk," as the title character (brilliantly portrayed by Sean Penn, reaffirming his status as the greatest actor of his generation), listens to his favorite opera. One of the appealing aspects of Puccini's music is the immediacy of its emotional character (interestingly, this is the bane of his music's existence for his many critics...but that's another story!). Thus, one need not recognize "E lucevan le stelle," the hero's aria near the end of his life--and therefore his relationship with his lover, Tosca--to hear it as a lament. The plaintive clarinet solo which presages this most passionate of tenor scenas is obviously tragic. But to know that Cavaradossi is singing of the memory of the "sweet kisses, the languid caresses" while Scott Smith (beautifully portrayed by James Franco) leaves his lover, Harvey Milk, was enough to make this opera queen cry. I know I'm not the only opera buff who immediately recognized the plangent tone of Giuseppe di Steffano (who died in 2008), in one of opera's ultimate cult classic recordings, featuring the muse of the opera queens, Maria Callas. But I digress. I don't know Gus Van Sant's operatic pedigree, but based on this film, I am impressed.
The night before he dies, in the panoramic, multi-layered penultimate scene, Milk attends a performance of "Tosca" at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco, one of the world's great opera houses. We see him take in the opera's final, shockingly violent moments, as Tosca realizes the "staged' execution of her lover was real, so rather than fleeing Rome with a safe passage to political asylum, Cavaradossi is dead, thus she flings herself from the parapet of the Castel Sant' Angelo, making her violent death the ultimate act in the opera. That "Milk" is as much political documentary as narrative film & biopic, therefore rendering suspense moot, in no way detracts from the affecting gravity of Milk's last night at the opera. This poignancy is reinforced by the final, slow-motion image from this exquisitely shot scene, where Milk's assassin, Dan White (an exceptional supporting turn by Josh Brolin) shoots him at point blank range, and the final image flashing before Milk's eyes are none other than the banners for Tosca, waving outside the Opera House, across the street from his City Hall office. I don't know if I've committed a sin in film criticism by divulging such details, but I know I would see the film again, for the above- mentioned scenes, for the relevance & importance of the film's subject, and the exceptional performances of James Franco and Sean Penn.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Art isn't easy...
Last week Elliott Carter turned 100 (b. Dec 11, 1908), and had a birthday celebration most mortals would metaphorically die for: a premiere of a new major work with world-class musicians. In this case, the conductor (and pianist, and pioneer) James Levine, the pianist (and conductor, and pioneer) Daniel Barenboim, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra convened at Carnegie Hall to premiere "Interventions" the latest work from this composer of autumnal masterworks. I can think of no artist in history--that is, NO ARTIST IN HISTORY-- who has been as fecund as Carter has since his 8th decade. Verdi composed Falstaff as an octogenarian, and is one of many artists who have had late creative bursts. No artist has had the flourish Carter has had, though, and the catalogue of works added to his c.v. in the past two decades (ie: his 80's and 90's!$%@!) is staggering. Among others, my personal library contains the momentous Symphonia ( a 45' minute canvas of Brucknerian proportions, depth, and scope), some half dozen major concerti, several chamber works, and an opera (the witty, piquant, timely "What Next?").
Last week I also attended Sondheim's most recent addition to his extraordinary canon of musicals. "Road Show" is the latest version of a musical previously known as "Bounce" and "Gold" and is his first new work since "Passion" appeared in 1994 (if memory serves me correctly). I enjoyed "Road Show" the way one might enjoy a new Carter score. Both composers have fierce partisan advocates. Both composers are more admired than loved. Both among audiences and critics. Both deserve more attention, more discerning criticism, and more airtime for their modern, timely, ascerbic, "difficult" scores to be appreciated, understood, and absorbed. In response to criticism about the "tunefulness" of his songs, Sondheim has quipped that any tune is hummable if one has heard it enough. I think both composers speak to the present time's need for substance. In a world of sound-bites, slogans, catch-phrases, tags, fads, and the ephemera of fashion and pop "culture" Carter and Sondheim represent pole-stars of substance and significance for their respective fields of symphony and musical. As such, they illuminate the unexamined reaches of the self, as Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" searingly states: "For there is no place that does not see you/You must change your life."
Last week I also attended Sondheim's most recent addition to his extraordinary canon of musicals. "Road Show" is the latest version of a musical previously known as "Bounce" and "Gold" and is his first new work since "Passion" appeared in 1994 (if memory serves me correctly). I enjoyed "Road Show" the way one might enjoy a new Carter score. Both composers have fierce partisan advocates. Both composers are more admired than loved. Both among audiences and critics. Both deserve more attention, more discerning criticism, and more airtime for their modern, timely, ascerbic, "difficult" scores to be appreciated, understood, and absorbed. In response to criticism about the "tunefulness" of his songs, Sondheim has quipped that any tune is hummable if one has heard it enough. I think both composers speak to the present time's need for substance. In a world of sound-bites, slogans, catch-phrases, tags, fads, and the ephemera of fashion and pop "culture" Carter and Sondheim represent pole-stars of substance and significance for their respective fields of symphony and musical. As such, they illuminate the unexamined reaches of the self, as Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo" searingly states: "For there is no place that does not see you/You must change your life."
Thursday, December 4, 2008
The fact is the sweetest dream that labor knows...On reading Robert Frost
The title is from Frost's early poem about work & the creative process called "Mowing" and is a great link to my current obsession with this most fascinating of our great American poets (and like many of his works, can be read a la double entendre). See below for more on Frost's multivalent meanings. First a digression on one of his early trips south (thanks to the Parini biography I mentioned in another post). Consider this entry my take on how one reads a poem...
20 year-old Rob Frost sojourned down from New England to Norfolk to visit the Dismal Swamp (an awesome natural wonder in our own backyard here in Tidewater, VA). He trekked on foot towards Deep Creek and blindly explored the swamp. This visit made a lasting impression, and images of solitary wanderers, loners, tramps, and pilgrims would people his poetry for the rest of his long life. As would the existential nature of the elements and, for that matter, nature itself. A survey of some titles of his individual books of poetry confirms this indebtedness: Mountain Interval, West-Running Brook, A Further Range, A Witness Tree, to his final collection, In the Clearing. And as always with Frost, layers of meaning are implicit in titles, phrases, stanzas, poems and entire collections. Multiple readings, like perspectives, can be fetched from line to line, poem to poem. Like a subject under a microscope, they lend themselves to being dissected, examined and re-examined, held up to the light and known in new ways.
Here's a little piece to wrap your head around. Its a modern version of an Elizabethan sonnet (an octave--that is, an 8-line stanza, and a musical one at that!--answered by a sextet, with the requisite iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme). At once an exquisitely crafted scena from the animal planet (a spider with its latest catch, a moth, on a flower, in the morning), it is a lesson in attention to details of the natural world, and a densely packed collection of metaphors (the religious/sacramental tone in line 3 juxtaposed with the Shakespearean evocation of Macbeth's witches in line 6, for starters).
That would be enough to qualify this little ditty as memorable, but Frost goes further, turning the Elizabethan model on its head (the closing sextet is supposed to "answer" or resolve the question or issue posed in the opening octave, with the closing rhyming couplet the climactic cadence to the exercise). Frost composes a sextet which is a series of (unanswerable) questions of existential dimension that anticipate the culture war on evolution v. "Intelligent design" by decades (Frost, in life and death, resists pigeon-holing. He is a bundle of contraries: independent, iconoclastic, progressive, conservative, reader of Darwin & Santayana, Emerson & Thoreau, Homer & the Old Testament; botanist, farmer, anti-establishment professor, and the list goes on...). The title of the poem doesn't appear until the closing couplet, and thus highlights the tightly controlled diction which packs a punch that shows this blazingly intelligent (self-taught-college-drop-out-with-2-dozen-honorary-doctorates) lyric poet in his best form.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern a thing so small.
(Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays.
The Library of America)
20 year-old Rob Frost sojourned down from New England to Norfolk to visit the Dismal Swamp (an awesome natural wonder in our own backyard here in Tidewater, VA). He trekked on foot towards Deep Creek and blindly explored the swamp. This visit made a lasting impression, and images of solitary wanderers, loners, tramps, and pilgrims would people his poetry for the rest of his long life. As would the existential nature of the elements and, for that matter, nature itself. A survey of some titles of his individual books of poetry confirms this indebtedness: Mountain Interval, West-Running Brook, A Further Range, A Witness Tree, to his final collection, In the Clearing. And as always with Frost, layers of meaning are implicit in titles, phrases, stanzas, poems and entire collections. Multiple readings, like perspectives, can be fetched from line to line, poem to poem. Like a subject under a microscope, they lend themselves to being dissected, examined and re-examined, held up to the light and known in new ways.
Here's a little piece to wrap your head around. Its a modern version of an Elizabethan sonnet (an octave--that is, an 8-line stanza, and a musical one at that!--answered by a sextet, with the requisite iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme). At once an exquisitely crafted scena from the animal planet (a spider with its latest catch, a moth, on a flower, in the morning), it is a lesson in attention to details of the natural world, and a densely packed collection of metaphors (the religious/sacramental tone in line 3 juxtaposed with the Shakespearean evocation of Macbeth's witches in line 6, for starters).
That would be enough to qualify this little ditty as memorable, but Frost goes further, turning the Elizabethan model on its head (the closing sextet is supposed to "answer" or resolve the question or issue posed in the opening octave, with the closing rhyming couplet the climactic cadence to the exercise). Frost composes a sextet which is a series of (unanswerable) questions of existential dimension that anticipate the culture war on evolution v. "Intelligent design" by decades (Frost, in life and death, resists pigeon-holing. He is a bundle of contraries: independent, iconoclastic, progressive, conservative, reader of Darwin & Santayana, Emerson & Thoreau, Homer & the Old Testament; botanist, farmer, anti-establishment professor, and the list goes on...). The title of the poem doesn't appear until the closing couplet, and thus highlights the tightly controlled diction which packs a punch that shows this blazingly intelligent (self-taught-college-drop-out-with-2-dozen-honorary-doctorates) lyric poet in his best form.
Design
I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth--
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches' broth--
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.
What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern a thing so small.
(Robert Frost: Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays.
The Library of America)
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
...A momentary stay against confusion: a few thoughts by and about Robert Frost
I have been reading and re-reading Robert Frost recently, from Jay Parini's excellent biography to the chestnut lyrics upon which his reputation rests to the dramatic poems that reveal penetrating insight into human nature, relationships, and existence. I have also been enjoying his idiosyncratic prose--letters and essays and lectures--all of which display the independence of thought and the fierce intelligence, the droll wit, and an uncanny gift for diction & metaphor. Below are a few examples from that prose, as found in the highly recommended Library of America edition of the Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays.
(On the poetry of Amy Lowell):
...permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly...
the proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it,
but that we know at sight that we could never forget it.
(Advice to writers & readers,
also worthy of the attention of actors, singers, performers, et al):
It is all right to repeat, if there is something for the voice to do.
The vital thing...is the ACTION of the voice...
Get the stuff of life into the technique of your writing [singing/playing/acting]
(More advice, to the same audience(s)...):
A poem begins with a a lump in the throat...
It is a reaching-out toward expression;
an effort to find fulfillment...A complete poem is one where
an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found the words.
(Ostensibly on belief in/about the creative process,
but also an illustration of the distinction
between "true" art and "mere" entertainment...)
Every time a poem is written...
it is written not by cunning, but by belief...
The beauty, the something...is more felt than known...
No one who has ever come close to the arts
has failed to see the difference between things written
that way with cunning and device,
and the kind that are believed into existence.
(On the poetry of Amy Lowell):
...permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly...
the proof of a poem is not that we have never forgotten it,
but that we know at sight that we could never forget it.
(Advice to writers & readers,
also worthy of the attention of actors, singers, performers, et al):
It is all right to repeat, if there is something for the voice to do.
The vital thing...is the ACTION of the voice...
Get the stuff of life into the technique of your writing [singing/playing/acting]
(More advice, to the same audience(s)...):
A poem begins with a a lump in the throat...
It is a reaching-out toward expression;
an effort to find fulfillment...A complete poem is one where
an emotion has found its thought
and the thought has found the words.
(Ostensibly on belief in/about the creative process,
but also an illustration of the distinction
between "true" art and "mere" entertainment...)
Every time a poem is written...
it is written not by cunning, but by belief...
The beauty, the something...is more felt than known...
No one who has ever come close to the arts
has failed to see the difference between things written
that way with cunning and device,
and the kind that are believed into existence.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Virginia Chorale Holiday Program notes
Since the Virginia Chorale's Holiday concerts are right around the corner, I thought I'd share my notes on the program. A couple of out-of-print selections have been replaced, thus the notes below are more up-to-date than those printed in the program when we went to press earlier this fall.
Holiday Festival of Light and Sound: Notes on the Program
In A Holiday Festival of Light and Sound we pay direct tribute to our founder, Donald McCullough. In so doing, we offer a program of music that reflects both the Chorale’s rich traditions and the wealth of exciting new music for the beloved medium of the a capella chorus.
Each of the sets of a capella works on the program link the old and the new directly, in music that spans 7 centuries, from 1420 to 2006. That newest work is the program opener, by the exciting young composer Ola Gjeilo. Born in Norway, he studied there, in London and New York, and now lives in Los Angeles. Prelude is framed by an exuberant, chant-inspired tune that sounds like music written 700 years earlier. Another living composer who evokes the sound-world of Medieval music is the composer and conductor, Paul Hillier. Founder of the acclaimed group, the Hilliard Ensemble, Hilliard is praised equally for his work in early and contemporary music. I sing of a maiden takes the anonymous 15th c. “Olde English” poem and sets it accordingly with a simple series of duets, culminating in an intimate chorale. One of the giants of 20th century choral and vocal music, Benjamin Britten is widely regarded as the greatest British composer after Purcell. Written at the start of Britten’s prolific career—he was just 17—A Hymn to the Virgin exhibits this composer’s gifts for setting poetic texts and creating colorful choral textures. In this Marian hymn, Britten assigns the anonymous 14th century carol to the main chorus, and intersperses those with words from a Latin poem, sung here by a solo quartet. Britten juxtaposes the poems brilliantly, heightening the word play of Ave and Eva, thus making palpable the connection between Eve and Mary, as composers have done for centuries.
Another gifted British composer, if less known and accomplished than his younger contemporary Britten, is Gerald Finzi. A complicated figure who lost both his brothers and his teacher in World War I, Finzi composed in a style indebted to the British romantics from Elgar to Vaughan Williams. Like his friend and mentor Vaughan Williams, Finzi was an agnostic who composed inspired and affective church music.
A gift both for lyrical melody and dramatic declamation infuse the Magnificat, one of the greatest settings of this beloved canticle. Written for the choirs of Smith and Amherst colleges in Massachusetts in 1952, this ten-minute musical canvas juxtaposes pastoral, folksong-like themes with music of grandeur and drama, exploiting the range of colors available to both the choir and the impressive organ part.
The first half of our program closes with a set of motets inspired by themes of light from which this concert takes its name. Beginning with a sublime hymn from the great Tudor composer, Thomas Tallis, we jump ahead to recent works by the popular US composers, Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen. O Nata Lux is another seasonal text that has long been a favorite of composers. In between Tallis’ classic Renaissance setting and Lauridsen’s neo-romantic, chant-inspired one is a luminous new classic, Lux Aurumque by another one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary music.
The second half explores our Silver Jubilee theme of tradition and innovation in offering the old and new side-by-side, or in this case, intertwined in the same piece. Jan Sandström takes Praetorius’ famous carol-hymn “Lo how a Rose e’er blooming” and juxtaposes the traditional four-part chorale with a modern harmonization evocative of the rich tapestry of metaphors in the poem—blooming rose, breaking dawn, and human birth.
An exact contemporary of Sandström is the New York City composer, Robert Convery. A graduate of both the Curtis Institute and the Julliard School, Bob has built a career writing exquisite music for the voice and has dozens of award-winning works in his catalog. We are honored to have Robert Convery compose a 25th Anniversary Commission, to be premiered here on our Silver Jubilee Season finale in April. Tonight we share a simple, carol-like lullaby, Christmas Daybreak, representative of its composer’s gifts of lyricism and immediacy.
We have one last set of beautiful a capella choruses—imaging themes of light, hope, and birth while cloaked in nocturnal shadows, thus illustrating the movement from night to morn, darkness to light. If Hillier’s I sing of a Maiden evokes the medieval carol, then the 1420 version of There is no rose is the real deal. It is followed by another contemporary setting of an ancient seasonal text. O Magnum Mysterium, by Indiana composer Lee Dengler, is a compelling example of the renewed interest among choral composers in writing accessible music with chant-like melodies and plush, neo-romantic harmonies.
With this, they honor composers like Britten and Poulenc, who assimilated a variety of influences in forging an original and immediate voice that communicates effectively. Yet the music of Francis Poulenc is simply like no other. Mozart, Fauré, Debussy, and Stravinsky, for starters, are all present in his music. Hodie Christus Est is the ebullient closing movement to his 4 Motets for Christmas.
Before we conclude our Holiday program with carols in which we would greatly appreciate your participation, we offer a couple of Holiday favorites—arrangements of seasonal folk carols by my graduate school mentor and friend, the eminent conductor and arranger, Joseph Flummerfelt. Whether conducting folk-song arrangements by Vaughan Williams or leading his own, Dr Flummerfelt's ear for color and line shaped both his memorable interpretations and arrangements like the 3 folk carols presented here. We conclude our Holiday concerts with the perennial favorite Ukrainian "Carol of the Bells" before inviting the audience to join us in singing the beloved carols, Silent Night, and Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.
Holiday Festival of Light and Sound: Notes on the Program
In A Holiday Festival of Light and Sound we pay direct tribute to our founder, Donald McCullough. In so doing, we offer a program of music that reflects both the Chorale’s rich traditions and the wealth of exciting new music for the beloved medium of the a capella chorus.
Each of the sets of a capella works on the program link the old and the new directly, in music that spans 7 centuries, from 1420 to 2006. That newest work is the program opener, by the exciting young composer Ola Gjeilo. Born in Norway, he studied there, in London and New York, and now lives in Los Angeles. Prelude is framed by an exuberant, chant-inspired tune that sounds like music written 700 years earlier. Another living composer who evokes the sound-world of Medieval music is the composer and conductor, Paul Hillier. Founder of the acclaimed group, the Hilliard Ensemble, Hilliard is praised equally for his work in early and contemporary music. I sing of a maiden takes the anonymous 15th c. “Olde English” poem and sets it accordingly with a simple series of duets, culminating in an intimate chorale. One of the giants of 20th century choral and vocal music, Benjamin Britten is widely regarded as the greatest British composer after Purcell. Written at the start of Britten’s prolific career—he was just 17—A Hymn to the Virgin exhibits this composer’s gifts for setting poetic texts and creating colorful choral textures. In this Marian hymn, Britten assigns the anonymous 14th century carol to the main chorus, and intersperses those with words from a Latin poem, sung here by a solo quartet. Britten juxtaposes the poems brilliantly, heightening the word play of Ave and Eva, thus making palpable the connection between Eve and Mary, as composers have done for centuries.
Another gifted British composer, if less known and accomplished than his younger contemporary Britten, is Gerald Finzi. A complicated figure who lost both his brothers and his teacher in World War I, Finzi composed in a style indebted to the British romantics from Elgar to Vaughan Williams. Like his friend and mentor Vaughan Williams, Finzi was an agnostic who composed inspired and affective church music.
A gift both for lyrical melody and dramatic declamation infuse the Magnificat, one of the greatest settings of this beloved canticle. Written for the choirs of Smith and Amherst colleges in Massachusetts in 1952, this ten-minute musical canvas juxtaposes pastoral, folksong-like themes with music of grandeur and drama, exploiting the range of colors available to both the choir and the impressive organ part.
The first half of our program closes with a set of motets inspired by themes of light from which this concert takes its name. Beginning with a sublime hymn from the great Tudor composer, Thomas Tallis, we jump ahead to recent works by the popular US composers, Eric Whitacre and Morten Lauridsen. O Nata Lux is another seasonal text that has long been a favorite of composers. In between Tallis’ classic Renaissance setting and Lauridsen’s neo-romantic, chant-inspired one is a luminous new classic, Lux Aurumque by another one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary music.
The second half explores our Silver Jubilee theme of tradition and innovation in offering the old and new side-by-side, or in this case, intertwined in the same piece. Jan Sandström takes Praetorius’ famous carol-hymn “Lo how a Rose e’er blooming” and juxtaposes the traditional four-part chorale with a modern harmonization evocative of the rich tapestry of metaphors in the poem—blooming rose, breaking dawn, and human birth.
An exact contemporary of Sandström is the New York City composer, Robert Convery. A graduate of both the Curtis Institute and the Julliard School, Bob has built a career writing exquisite music for the voice and has dozens of award-winning works in his catalog. We are honored to have Robert Convery compose a 25th Anniversary Commission, to be premiered here on our Silver Jubilee Season finale in April. Tonight we share a simple, carol-like lullaby, Christmas Daybreak, representative of its composer’s gifts of lyricism and immediacy.
We have one last set of beautiful a capella choruses—imaging themes of light, hope, and birth while cloaked in nocturnal shadows, thus illustrating the movement from night to morn, darkness to light. If Hillier’s I sing of a Maiden evokes the medieval carol, then the 1420 version of There is no rose is the real deal. It is followed by another contemporary setting of an ancient seasonal text. O Magnum Mysterium, by Indiana composer Lee Dengler, is a compelling example of the renewed interest among choral composers in writing accessible music with chant-like melodies and plush, neo-romantic harmonies.
With this, they honor composers like Britten and Poulenc, who assimilated a variety of influences in forging an original and immediate voice that communicates effectively. Yet the music of Francis Poulenc is simply like no other. Mozart, Fauré, Debussy, and Stravinsky, for starters, are all present in his music. Hodie Christus Est is the ebullient closing movement to his 4 Motets for Christmas.
Before we conclude our Holiday program with carols in which we would greatly appreciate your participation, we offer a couple of Holiday favorites—arrangements of seasonal folk carols by my graduate school mentor and friend, the eminent conductor and arranger, Joseph Flummerfelt. Whether conducting folk-song arrangements by Vaughan Williams or leading his own, Dr Flummerfelt's ear for color and line shaped both his memorable interpretations and arrangements like the 3 folk carols presented here. We conclude our Holiday concerts with the perennial favorite Ukrainian "Carol of the Bells" before inviting the audience to join us in singing the beloved carols, Silent Night, and Hark, the Herald Angels Sing.
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