Festival of the Sound 2018 # 7: Times of Trouble, Times of Joy

The title, Times of Trouble, Times of Joy, served both as a motto for the Festival's opening weekend and as a specific title for the Sunday night concert by the Elmer Iseler Singers.

The entire first half of the concert was given over to a contemporary work, The Little Match Girl Passion, by American composer David Lang.  Originally written for vocal quartet and percussion in 2007, it was expanded for chamber choir and percussion in 2009.

The title explains the work's dual roots.  The story comes from the eponymous children's tale by Hans Christian Andersen, while the structure of the libretto, written by Lang himself, takes its form from the great Passion settings of Bach.

As with Bach, the singers sometimes narrate, sometimes comment on the action, and sometimes meditate on its meaning for them -- and for us.

The resemblance stops there.

Lang's compositional language is uniquely contemporary in fusing together elements of several recent musical movements in new and sometimes unnerving ways.  Minimalism with its short, oft-repeated motifs certainly has a role, and the result is music which is highly constructed, one might almost say "manufactured."

Utterly missing is the profound emotionalism of Bach, which encourages and invites the audience to enter into the sufferings of the Saviour and experience them anew in ourselves. 

The musical language of Lang's work, then, reminds me of nothing so much as the Brechtian model of "epic theatre" which seeks to push us outside of the story, where we can't bring our emotions to bear and must instead respond thoughtfully and rationally to what we hear or see.

Different sections of the choir have their own short musical motifs, which are sung at different speeds to different versions of the text.  One will sing in whole sentences, another in partial phrases, while a third group may only repeat slowly a single key word.  Since the musical phrases often remain unchanged for many repetitions, the breaks between those phrases will sometimes fall right in the middle of a line or sentence, causing a break in the meaning.  

In this way, a short passage of text can be extended over a span of several minutes, with the ever-shifting kaleidoscopic textures continually pointing up new words for our attention.  By contrast, the narrative sections -- lengthy passages drawn from H. P. Paull's English translation of the original story -- are recited relatively quickly, again to repeated melodic motifs.

The score also calls for an assortment of percussion instruments, played (sparingly and always quietly) by four members of the choir. The crystalline glitter of many of these sounds gave all the colour needed to set the winter scene, while the quiet rumbling of the bass drum imparted an apt air of solemnity to the performance. As well, the four players had short solo parts, sung or spoken, at key moments in the story.

Explained this way, in dry, technical language, this may sound like a recipe for boredom.  In performance, it was anything but.

The slow opening section, Come, daughter, exactly analogous in purpose to the opening chorus of Bach's St. Matthew Passion, drew the audience in with the quiet, hypnotic repetitions of the key words "come" and "gone."

From that point, the performance continued with the utter concentration of the singers paralleled by an equally intense stillness among the listeners.  Guest director Mitchell Pady conducted in a spare, simple style appropriate to the nature of the work.  The singing, too, remained for the most part quiet, firm and clear, but rarely expressive.  The exception came with the chorus, Eli, Eli -- significantly, the one part of the text which was drawn directly from Bach.

It was significant, too, that Lang stopped his quotation of Christ's cry of anguish at that point -- "My God, My God" -- without continuing on to lama sabachthani -- "Why have you forsaken me?"

The choir's diction throughout was impeccable, an absolutely critical requirement in a work where the text is so thoroughly disassembled and reconstructed in so many different forms.

More than anything, I was struck by the fact that the performance left me, not with feelings of sympathy for the little girl, but with a profound sadness for a human race that claims to be "civilized" yet fails to prevent such things from continuing to happen  -- and they do continue, today.

The impact of The Little Match Girl Passion was such that I chose not to remain for the second half of the concert.  I truly needed time to ponder the power and meaning of what I had just heard, and I feared that the second half of the programme, representing the "times of joy", would cause me to lose my connection with the experience.

That second half, by the way, included many audience favourites such as a group of spirituals, Bach's famous chorale Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring, I Vow to Thee My Country, grandmother moon by Parry Sound-born Eleanor Daley, and ended with a rousing sing-along of Beethoven's immortal Ode to Joy.  I know that Music Director Lydia Adams would have directed all of this music with her customary skill, and I'm sure I would have enjoyed all of it -- but not on this particular occasion.