In Sight and Sound

Ten days ago, I attended a unique concert given in Hamilton by the chamber choir Musicata, formerly known as the John Laing Singers.  This concert triggered my last post, the essay about the "hybrid arts" label on this blog.  The programme, entitled "In Sight and Sound," featured a close integration of music with painting and a digital video presentation which could as well have been called a film.

The music performed by the choir, mostly unaccompanied, ranged from the sixteenth to the twenty-first century in a diverse panorama of different kinds of choral art.  

The visual component was engaged twice during the programme, once with a potpourri of medieval and renaissance religious art, and once with a collection of original paintings inspired by the music and the texts being performed.

I'm going to comment on a few highlights of the programme, and save my most detailed thoughts for the hybrid arts portions.

The programme opened with the motet Levavi oculos meos, composed in Germany in 1585 by Hans Leo Hassler.  It's risky to open a concert with such a challenging piece, where individual parts flow by each other in pure polyphony, and indeed the tuning was a bit shaky here although the choir produced lovely tone.

Next, we heard an unusual full anthem -- I am come into my garden -- by William Billings, the earliest known American composer.  Like much of what I have heard of the music of Billings in the past, this upbeat -- almost jolly -- work relied far more on chordal harmony, with only a few moments of simple polyphony.  In that respect, it reflected the tradition of limited and simple singing followed by the churches of New England in the 1600s and 1700s.  A fun piece, and given a definitely hearty performance.

The Long Road, by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, produced lovely tonal contrast between the full body and a semi-chorus, and some fascinating shimmering vocal effects alongside rich yet more traditional harmonies.  

The choir then returned to a more classic style with Os justi by Anton Bruckner.  Inspired by the music of earlier masters and by the ideals of the 19th-century Cecilian movement, Bruckner returned to the pure vocal polyphony of an earlier age, but imbued with the more diverse harmonies of his own time.  By now, the choir's singing was fully in tune and fully in accord with the spirit of the music, not least in the serene plainchant Alleluia which ends the motet.

The first half ended with the hypnotically serene sounds of the Magnificat by Arvo Pärt.  To meet the essential quality of this music, the choir must give a seamless performance in which time feels suspended, and space feels illimitable.  This they certainly accomplished, to stunning effect.  The latent power of this music was amplified by the accompanying digital projections.  A series of pictures of various paintings of the Virgin Mary flowed and dissolved on the screen, creating an endless stream of imagery matching the flow of sound.  The pictures came from different artists, and depicted different scenes of the Annunciation, the Birth, the Naming of Jesus, and the classic image of the Madonna and Child in varying guises.  

The images were carefully assembled so that a full picture would dissolve into a close-up of one part of another, and that in turn back to a full image of a third, and so on.  The timeless quality of these classic paintings matched Pärt's music beautifully, heightening the sensory impact of the choral sound.

In the second half, the final six works were assembled into a "hexaptych" (sorry, I had to show off the new word which I learned today!) of greatly varying character, all accompanied by projections of painted images inspired by the music and texts, created by artist Phil Irish.  

The choir moved with easy assurance among the varying styles of these six works.  Of the six works, one that made a great impression was a world premiere, Sanctum, by Jordan Sabola.  It was a first-ever work for choir by Sabola, a composition student who is not yet 20 years old.  I was impressed by the assurance of his handling of the choral medium.  His will definitely be a name to watch if he continues to pursue composition -- and I hope he will.

Polar opposite to the serenity of Sabola's sound world was the energetic, restless, unceasing rhythmic patter of Eric Whitacre's little man in a hurry, to a poem by e.e.cummings.  Whitacre's music in this number demands immense precision and crisp sound, and this we definitely got.  

Last number on the programme was a composition by Canadian composer Leonard Enns,  I saw eternity, set to a poetic fragment by the Welsh mystical poet Henry Vaughan.  Vaughan, like his mentor, George Herbert, has long been a favourite author of mine, and I was truly moved by this deeply felt music, in which both composer and choir entered fully into the spirit of the text.

The artworks projected during this 6-part choral mosaic included images of mountains, trees, birds, and other subjects.  The paintings were sometimes presented in fragmentary form, so that certain key images appeared again and again -- but apparently in different contexts.  The projections also made use of the ability of the digital format to spin the images slowly towards or away from the viewer, so that a bird for instance might recede into the distance against another image while slowly rotating in a clockwise direction.  

Again, as with the religious paintings shown earlier, this imaginative melding of painting and digital presentation practically amounted to a fully-realized film counterpart of the sung music, with each working to highlight audience perception of the other.  

I'd certainly be intrigued to see Musicata and Artistic Director Roger Bergs pursue this concept further in a future programme, perhaps with different artists and a different theme uniting the music chosen for performance.  It's absolutely an idea worth developing further.