Orchestra Seattle will mount one of the classical music highlights of the spring – Bach’s epic St. Matthew Passion – this Sunday at First Free Methodist Church. As has been the case all season, a guest conductor will helm the orchestra. This week it is noted Bach specialist Hans-Jurgen Schnoor. Earlier in the week, I asked Schnoor about the piece and his approach to a large scale work like the Matthew Passion.
Continue reading Hans-Jurgen Schnoor takes up St. Matthew Passion with OSSCS
By Philippa Kiraly
We don’t often have the opportunity to hear either of the great Bach Passions, so we owe a big vote of thanks to the Early Music Guild for bringing us a stellar performance of the St. John Passion by Portland Baroque Orchestra, Les Voix Baroques, and Cappella Romana, Sunday afternoon at Town Hall.
Monica Huggett, violinist and artistic director of Portland Baroque, chose to perform it with a small orchestra of fourteen and small chorus of twelve.which included the soloists. While this Passion is shorter than the St. Matthew, two and a quarter hours including an intermission, this puts quite a burden on the singers who stood throughout, particularly tenor Charles Daniels, who sang all the chorales and choruses as well as the demanding role of the Evangelist.
Continue reading Portland Baroque presents Bach’s St John Passion as part of Handel Festival
By Philippa Kiraly
January 6th this year was Christmas day in the Julian Calendar, and this is the calendar followed by the Eastern Orthodox churches. So it was perfectly appropriate and not at all tardy for Cappella Romana to give a concert of Russian and Ukrainian Christmas music at St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church in Montlake last Saturday night.
The church was nearly full of people, many from Seattle’s Russian community, and many in the intermission spent time looking at the fine mosaics and iconic paintings which adorn it.
The performance was conducted not by Cappella Romana’s music director, Alexander Lingas, but by an equally renowned scholar in Slavic music, this time of the 17th and 18th centuries. Mark Bailey was guest directing for the third time with this group.
Continue reading Christmas on the Julian Calendar
By Philippa Kiraly
As a rule we expect Cappella Romana to enlighten and enthrall us with music of the Greek and Russian Orthodox churches from the Middle Ages to the present day. For its first concert of this season, it turned to the English church choral tradition of the Renaissance in a fascinating, moving performance directed by a guest conductor from England, Guy Protheroe.
Choosing Holy Rosary Church in West Seattle for the venue Saturday night, a place where the choir has sung before, gave the requisite reverberation to allow the music to bloom, though it made words very hard to distinguish.
Continue reading Cappella Romana turns to England
It’s that time of year again. Orchestras, professional and volunteer, are wrapping up their seasons. Two of Seattle’s many community orchestras finished their seasons this weekend. The Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra – University of Washington conducting student Geoffrey Larson’s creation – closed their inaugural season with a concert titled “Just Dance.” The next day, George Shangrow, Orchestra Seattle, and the Seattle Chamber Singers ended their 2009/2010 series of concerts with a jazz (and Bernstein) inspired program that featured two works by Washington composers and choruses from Leonard Bernstein’s incidental music to the Lark.
Continue reading The 2009/2010 season comes to an end for OSSCS and SMCO
With Haptadama: The Seven Creations of Ancient Persia, Eric Banks unexpectedly challenges audiences to reconsider how they think about opera. It’s not that Banks is dabbling in new forms or means of expression – although he does have a tremendous gift for contemporizing ancient languages and melodies in ways that observe texts, respect original ideas, and avoid kitsch. Banks calls Haptadama a choral opera. However the piece synthesizes opera, song cycles, and sacred music that leads listeners in a number of different directions.
Banks got the idea to write Haptadama after two visits to India. The material for the piece comes from the Persian creation story of the Zorostrians drawn from both the Gathas and Bundahisn. The Gathas, perhaps the oldest written music in history, provide an austere framework for the piece. The Bundahisn, on the other hand, gives the music its mystical quality. The creation story follows a well worn formula. A benevolent creator coexists with evil. The creator creates life and the known world. Evil strikes back causing cataclysm and robbing the world of its innocence. The creator redeems the world by wiping everything out with a cleansing flood.
Continue reading Haptadama comes to a close at Olympic Sculpture Park on Saturday night
By Peter A. Klein
The poetry of teenaged Jewish boys imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp will be given new life in the oratorio “Vedem,” by composer Lori Laitman and librettist David Mason. “Vedem” will receive its world premiere at Music of Remembrance’s spring concert on Monday evening, May 10 at 8:00 PM in Benaroya Recital Hall.
Laitman believes that these lines of Mason’s express the essence of the piece:
We lived for what we wrote and painted,
as if imagination were a jewel.
Terezín (aka Theresienstadt) is an old Czech fortress town which the Nazis turned into a transit camp during the Holocaust. 144,000 Jews were sent to Terezín, including many from the arts and letters. One-quarter of the prisoners died there, and two-thirds were later killed in the death camps. Yet they created an astounding cultural life in Terezín, which existed right alongside starvation, cold, overcrowding, disease, and death.
Continue reading MOR commissions Vedem; receives world premiere next week
The two pieces of sacred music I turn to most often are W.A. Mozart’s Requiem – the first piece of music I ever fell in love with – and J. Brahms’ German Requiem – the first Brahms piece I heard in its entirety. These two pieces shaped my formative listening years and instilled in me an admiration and (minor) obsession with sacred music. After Brahms came Handel, Verdi, Haydn, Bruckner, Bach, and of course more Mozart. But even with a catalog of masses, motets, and cantatas at my disposal, Mozart’s and Brahms’ signature sacred pieces always stimulate my God Spot.
On Saturday, Fred Coleman and the Seattle Choral company ended their 2009/2010 season with half of my sacred music top two – the German Requiem. But, before I could get to the Brahms, I first had to go through Dvorak’s Te Deum.
Continue reading O death where is thy sting?
Seattle’s choral music community is routinely passed over in praise and attention in favor of the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera. Even Seattle’s healthy early music community often garners more attention. This deficit persists even as local choral music groups have celebrated the contributions of Frank Ferko, centuries of “French” composers including Frank Martin, and Samuel Barber in his anniversary year during the month of March.
In the most recently concluded concert, Seattle Choral Arts presented what turned out to be the west coast premiere of Palo Alto, California (by way of Chicago and Valparaiso) composer Frank Ferko’s setting of the Stabat Mater. Most of the area’s local music lovers probably had never heard of Ferko before he talked publicly about composing the piece at a March 19th meet the composer reception held at Fare Start in downtown Seattle. Robert Bode, Choral Arts’ engaging music director even confessed that he didn’t know Ferko’s setting until he came across a recording of the piece by Cedille records, Anne Heider, and His Majestie’s Clerks.
Continue reading Celebrating Seattle’s choral music community
By R.M. Campbell
Of all the rituals of the Roman Catholic church, one of the most mysterious and profound, and perhaps less known, must be its Tenebrae service traditionally said the last three days of Holy Week. St. James Cathedral held it Wednesday night with all due solemnity and dark eloquence.
The ambience of the church set the tone. As one entered, the lights were low and shadowy — dark actually: “Tenebrae” means “darkness” in Latin. There was a soft glow to the church including backlighting of the glass windows above the doors and the rich decor of the stained windows in the clerestory. There was a handful of candles principally six mounted high around the altar and 15 on a candelabra and a pair flanking the chair of the Very Reverend Michael G. Ryan, pastor of the cathedral, who presided. The musical forces were spare. They included the excellent singers of two of the church’s vocal ensembles, organist Joseph Adam and viola da gambist Margriet Tindemans. The forces in that large space were small but everything could be heard, and it had meaning.
The singing, chanting, praying and speaking were seamlessly coordinated, sounds going back and forth from the transept to the apse. The darkness appeared to make everything more of another world than this one. After the reading of each psalm one of the large candles was snuffed out. Slowly other lights were dimmed and eventually only 15 were left . They too, two by two, after the Benedictus Dominus was sung, were extinguished by servers leaving only the top one left. Then that was snuffed out, leaving the church in silence and complete darkness to commemorate the effect of the death of Christ. The only sound was that of clappers, which are used throughout the world in all sorts of rites and religious services as well as theater, The effect was haunting. At the very end, the candle at the top of the candelabra was relit to signify that Christ had risen. People left the church quietly.
Gathering Note 