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Turning
on a dime
In praise of nature
Saturday, November 18, 2006
By Paul M. Somers
Summit Chorale, Richard Garrin (conductor), Douglas Keilitz (accompanist), Susan M. Bovan (oboe). “Let Nature Take Its Chorus …” Traditional hymns and music by Gibbons, Lauridsen, Agular, Daniel Moe, Distler, Copland, Mark Carlson, William Copper, Z. Randall Stroope and Samuel A. Goldberg, and Hank Beebe. Presbyterian Church of Madison (also performed on Friday, November 17, at St. John’s Lutheran Church, Summit).
The Summit Chorale under the leadership of Richard Garrin has become an ensemble which can change style on a dime, moving from Orlando Gibbons to Morten Lauridsen to Native American music providing a different vocal quality for each. They also have taken on pieces in which they play drums, or clap.
The most dramatic use of clapping was during the old Spanish carol Riu, riu, chiu in which the sound of hands striking together was only part of the effect. Each part had a different rhythmic pattern which was introduced as the sole accompaniment for its own stanza within the lengthy *strophic song. As the stanzas progressed, the various rhythm patterns were combined differently, and finally with all together. But even this was not the complete interest, for Garrin had the hands striking the base of the palm in a unifying vertical pose with hands quite visible. As each clapping group concluded its turn, the hands left the pose slowly and in unison. So the piece became a riveting visual as well as sound experience. What can often become a tedious repetition of stanza after stanza in this folksong became, instead, quite dramatic and even suspenseful. We couldn’t wait to see and hear how the next stanza would be treated. Each had a different soloist from the ensemble, and each was securely robust.
The entire evening was related to the punning concert title — “Let Nature Take its Chorus …” This was further divided into “Praise and Awe” (which beats “shock and awe” every time) and “The Seasons, Nature, and Furry Friends” (there were no songs about turtles or snakes, presumably because of their lack of fur).
The concert began with Alice Parker’s arrangement of the traditional hymn “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal.” Harps we did not hear. Instead the processional was driven along by African-style drums. This writer hasn’t heard such a dramatic choral concert opening since Laude! Chamber Singers came down the aisle with drums going while singing a song from Cameroon several years ago. Whew! It surely got the blood going in the Summit Chorale singers and the audience!
The “turn on a dime” effect immediately kicked in. The second piece was Orlando Gibbons’ famed madrigal The Silver Swan. From camp-meeting-style full voices to refined renaissance-straight-tones with barely 30 seconds between was a major mental and physical adjustment handled excellently by the Chorale members. (By the way, if you were trying out for New Jersey All-State Chorus in the late 1950s, you sang this as part of an audition quartet.)
The most “modern” sounding music (whatever that means in our eclectic age) was Morten Lauridsen’s oft performed Les chansons des roses on poems by Rilke. Whether producing clean declamation in the *homophonic settings or the gentle tone clusters upon which the composer loves to rest light-filled moments, this was a performance which was expressive and restrained. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the Chansons is Lauridsen at his sweetly beautiful best.
Garrin programed music by the 20th century German composer Hugo Distler, something this listener has awaited from all choral ensembles for years. On this occasion we heard his *motet on “Lo, how a rose e’er blooming,” in which we heard the vigorous taste of the composer’s baroque clarity of line and the sensibility of the modernist’s harmonic colors. More Distler, please!
Again, a stylistic transformation in no time flat brought us from Distler’s post-Buxtehude sweetness to Aaron Copland’s rowdy {Stomp Your Foot” from his opera The Tender Land (speaking of agrarian pieces needing to be staged in full in the Garden State). The piano duet team of regular accompanist Douglas Keilitz and Martha Hartman recreated the rhythmic precision of the orchestral original. The chorale provided all the energy it demanded, lacking only actual dancing to capture the mood fully.
Other highlights for this listener were the adjacent Salmo 150 by Brazilian Ernani Agular and Daniel Moe’s setting of Chief Seattle’s Psalm, an apocryphal text, but it hardly matters. It built to a powerful and energetic final chord.
Garrin kept up the theme of percussive accompaniments with a rain-stick and bongos as part of the “Trés cantos Nativos dos Indios Krao” arranged by Brazilian Marcos Leite so as to give some singers the chance to ad lib bird songs and animal cries.
Other music was well executed and clever, but far more “normal.”
The concert danced its way to conclusion with Hank Beebe’s vivaciously rhythmic Go Out With Joy.