This week's virtual Festival of Carols concert from the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir triumphantly overcame all obstacles to continue a much-loved Toronto tradition in a year of challenges.
Mounting this programme was especially challenging for the TMC because the Choir had planned and hoped to do an in-person live concert, and was forced by degrees to toss all its plans overboard and re-imagine the entire enterprise for a virtual audience.
With Toronto currently under the most extreme conditions of lockdown, the Choir had to dispense with any thought of live performance on screen and instead adopt a sequence of fascinating visual makeshifts to provide a key element of the entire experience.
The first makeshift became evident in the very first number, Hannah Kendall's Nativity, written in 2006. In this work for 3-voice SSA choir and 3 solo voices, the singers were distributed widely across the gardens of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, in a broad arc around conductor Simon Rivard. The resonant acoustic surrounding the voices, and lack of any background traffic noise, made it obvious that the music had been previously recorded indoors (in St. Anne's Anglican Church). The credits at the end confirmed that the singers in the park weren't actually singing as the video was made.
This unique outdoor re-creation of musical performance was made for several of the numbers during the concert. The visuals of a cold winter's night, with illuminated Christmas trees in the background and singers warmly wrapped in coats, mitts, scarves, and the like, added atmosphere to a work which already had plenty of atmosphere to share.
Sadly, Kendall's music in this work belongs to the category of choral music which has little but atmosphere to offer. The slow-moving, multiple layers of sound were undoubtedly evocative and beautiful but it was challenging to try to discern any of the text. For much of the piece, the voices could as easily have been vocalizing on open vowels.
In another league altogether was Richard Allain's haunting arrangement -- although I would call it a recomposition -- of the medieval Coventry Carol. As beautiful as the carol is, its ongoing association with Christmas celebrations has always puzzled me since the ancient melody is a lament for the deaths of the children of Bethlehem, slaughtered at the word of the tyrannical Herod the Great.
Allain's inspiration here was the incorporation of a steady undulation between two notes a minor second apart, which runs as an ostinato throughout the entire three verses of the carol. For me it evoked the tragic weeping of the women, and heightened the emotional impact of the text by a quantum factor. The choir's intense performance in this gem sent chills down my spine.
The third main work was a premiere, A Hymn on the Nativity by Alastair Boyd. This was the winner of the 2020 TMC Choral Composition Competition. Boyd's music, predominantly chordal in texture, fused a traditional musical language with enough intriguing harmonies to keep the audience on their toes in following the music -- an imaginative new creation indeed.
From this point on, the concert moved to more traditional Christmas fare. And after all, what would Christmas with the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir be without a dose of Handel's Messiah? The thrilling virtual performance used here was made by the choir and musicians as part of the recent online Messiah/Complex, a nationwide, multilingual performance masterminded by Against the Grain Theatre.
(As a footnote, I've mentioned previously that I sang with the Choir for one season, in 1977-78. We had only one orchestral rehearsal on Messiah with the Toronto Symphony that year due to our protracted radio taping of a Murray Schafer work for the CBC. On the day of that only rehearsal, I came down with a filthy cold -- and thereby became one of the few members of the TMC in the last 88 years, perhaps the only member, to complete my tenure in the Choir without ever cracking my Messiah score.)
This is a good spot to mention the choice the Choir made to have each number in this Christmas programme introduced on screen by a different member of the choir, giving us a bit of background from each one on their place in the choir and what it has meant to them. In between two of the traditional carols, a member whose family roots lie in the Philippines spoke of her Christmas traditions, and was accompanied by an instrumental arrangement of Payapang Daigdig by Felipe Padilla de Leon. It was an intriguing and lovely nod towards the multi-cultural richness of Toronto and of Canada. So also was the visual depiction of people of multiple races and nationalities from all parts of Canada during the Hallelujah Chorus.
Excerpts from the Choir's 2019 Festival of Carols, filmed in Yorkminster Park Church, included Hark, the Herald Angels Sing, Away in a Manger with an intriguing reset of the first verse for choir only, and The First Nowell. All of these carols had been sing-along numbers in 2019, and this year's online audience were encouraged to stand up and have a go as well!
The climax of the evening came for me at the end. The final carol of the evening was O Come All Ye Faithful, and was sung in Sir David Willcocks' magnificent arrangement in which each of the four verses is harmonized and accompanied differently, building to the spectacular closing bars of the fourth verse.
Organist Matthew Larkin joined in virtually, on the magnificent organ of the Notre-Dame Cathedral Basilica in Ottawa, first playing a gripping symphonic introduction, and then accompanying the choir. In the final verse, Larkin added more stops, line by line, until he was calling on the full resources of the instrument, including the thunderous pedals, to underscore the final phrases from the choir. The thrilling combination of the voices with such a splendid organ brought tears to my eyes.
Like the previous online concerts from the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, this wonderful Festival of Carols lasts less than an hour and is worth every second of the time. It's available free of charge on the Choir's website:
For those interested in checking out the full performance of Messiah/Complex, you can register for a free ticket at this link, and the ticket remains valid to view the performance as many times as you wish between now and January 7, 2021.
