Welcome to my third installment of musical performances during the era of lockdown and social distancing due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
All the items I've shared so far in this series have been single performances. For this review, I'm bringing you an entire concert, just a few minutes shy of an hour long.
On Saturday, May 30, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir was scheduled to round out its season with a concert devoted to great poets in music -- a concert which I had fully planned to attend.
With a little bit of luck and a great deal of ingenuity, planning, effort, and coordination, the Choir has managed instead to present an online virtual concert built around the same theme. It originally aired at the same time that the live concert was scheduled to take place, and is now available online.
To pull this effort together, the Choir has brought together audio recorded performances from five other choirs, tossed in a previous video performance and a new social-distancing recording of their own, and tied the entire evening together with readings of great poetry and theatre by renowned Canadian actors Tom McCamus and Lucy Peacock and commentary by the choir's interim conductor, David Fallis.
The theme which tied the whole diverse programme together was the idea of the power of words and music -- power to move, power to heal, power to exhort, and power to reconcile.
This remarkable concert featured recordings by the Somnium Ensemble of Finland, the Utah Chamber Artists and the Antioch Chamber Ensemble from the United States, the Cambridge Singers and Cambridge Chorale from the United Kingdom, and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir from Canada.
The music presented represented a diverse array of composers: Sir Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams, Jonathan Dove, Leonard Cohen, and Gabriel Faure.
The poetry and dramatic prose was drawn from William Shakespeare (no surprise there), George Bernard Shaw, Leonard Cohen, Jean Racine, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
I want to comment first on the spoken performances of Peacock and McCamus. Although both adopted an understated style entirely suited to the home environment of both actors and audience, the rhythms and cadences of a live performance were still audibly present in their every word. I was surprised when I heard Lucy Peacock remark that she had never performed the title role of Shaw's Saint Joan, but even more surprised when I heard her in a key scene from that play. I could have sworn that I was hearing again a performance I had heard before. It's a pity she never did assume the role on stage -- I'm sure she would have been memorable. Another fine moment came with her underplayed but deeply-felt reading of "The cloud-capped towers..." from The Tempest.
McCamus hit his high point in the intensely moving unveiling scene from the final act of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Make no mistake, though, he was equally moving in the gorgeous poetry of the garden scene from The Merchant of Venice, one of the most intensely musical set-pieces in the entire Shakespearean canon.
Among the music, pride of place (for me, at least) went to the Three Shakespeare Songs by Vaughan Williams. It was a minor but not insignificant choice to have these three pieces separated by readings, and to have each of the three sung by a different choir. These are late works, written when the composer was nearing his 80th birthday, and they are worlds away from the archaic Tudor sounds and robust folk-music rhythms of his younger years. Each of the three choirs did splendid work with the strange, almost other-worldly, yet still beguiling harmonic landscape of these pieces.
The striking performance of Ring Out, Wild Bells from Jonathan Dove's The Passing of the Year made me eager to explore more output of this prolific British composer of opera, choral. and vocal music.
The end of the entire concert was given over to the Mendelssohn Choir itself -- fair enough, since this venerable Toronto institution (125 years old this year) set the whole ball rolling on this complex project.
The video recording of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah, made at a concert in Yorkminster Park Baptist Church in Toronto, brought spine-tingling singing from the choir, the sound expanding richly in the church's ample acoustic. Sadly, the two fine soloists within the choir were much harder to hear since they were not specially miked.
The conclusion of the whole concert was a true social distancing event, involving numerous members of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra and Toronto Symphony Orchestra, and of the Choir, in a socially-distanced performance of the lovely Cantique de Jean Racine, composed by Gabriel Faure at the tender age of 19. Both the players and the singers achieved very fine tonal blend and unanimity under the challenging conditions where each one has to record her/his part separately at home. As for the video production, the editing process has taken some imaginative and intriguing approaches to the question of who should be displayed on the screen at which times, and in what places -- this video goes far beyond the approach of so many others which try to duplicate a traditional concert layout.
This special online concert marked the official first showing of the Cantique de Jean Racine video and this performance made a beautiful, touching conclusion to a remarkably diverse and fascinating evening of music and poetry. Kudos to the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, interim conductor David Fallis, actors Lucy Peacock and Tom McCamus, and all the behind-the-scenes technical people who brought this unique event together and made it so successful and so moving.
You can view the programme details for the concert online here:
The actual concert can be viewed at this link:
