National Ballet 2021-2022 # 1: Returning to the Light

The return to live performances continues to accelerate for me.  After hearing a choral concert, and viewing a dance programme, during a 5-day period last week, I now have experienced both a live dance performance and a live orchestral concert in one day (Saturday, November 13).

 

In this case, both organizations (the National Ballet and the Toronto Symphony) planned to follow a cautious path, at first selling less than the full capacity of the house, and opting for a 70-80 minute long programme with no intermission.

 

The National Ballet of Canada presents its first live performances in its home venue, the Four Seasons Centre for the Arts, with a return of one of the works presented in the last complete run of performances before the pandemic shutdown occurred, a work created especially for video presentation during the shutdown, and a beloved, timeless classic from the company's standing repertoire.

 

Keywords for the first work on the programme, George Balanchine's classic Serenade (created in 1934): "poise" and "grace." It's ironic that many people think of those qualities in relation to classical ballet, yet many of the most loved classical masterworks are largely designed as stunning demonstrations of the athletic skill of the dancers.  Serenade is different indeed, and it's the difference that gives this work its timeless quality.

 

Balanchine was famed for his desire to bring his dance into full communion with the music on which he set it, and in this he was worlds apart from the great choreographers of the past -- who tended to treat the music as so many yards of interchangeable carpeting on which to mount their showpieces.

 

The curtain rises on a stage awash in blue light, with seventeen women standing in ordered diagonal lines, each one raising her right hand with the palm turned out. That moment of pure order and beauty presages the entire piece to follow. Even though many passages in Serenade call for very intricate footwork indeed, it's always poised and graceful, never as aware of its own cleverness as the great showstoppers of the past tend to be.  In this, the ballet is completely at one with its music, the gentle, courtly Serenade for Strings by Tchaikovsky, a musical work best described (in painting terms) as gentle, subdued watercolours or pastels rather than vigorous, vibrant colours in oils. 

 

While the company rose magnificently to the more high-speed technical challenges of the third movement (actually Tchaikovsky's finale), it was the slower, more lyrical work in the other sections that captured my imagination and defined the performance. Serenade is definitely a company piece, and it's as a company that dancers make this work happen. It wasn't hard to see the corporate unanimity of the dancers in making the entire piece glow as vibrantly as they did. Never have the final moments of Serenade seemed at once so mournful yet so uplifting (not intended as a pun, by the way).

 

In lieu of an intermission, the company opted to present the one of the video dance works designed expressly for online presentation during the pandemic, Jera Wolfe's Soul. I'd seen Soul on line when it was first presented last year, and was looking forward to seeing it on the big screen as opposed to my rather unambitious little laptop. I was certainly not disappointed as the screen was big enough to fill the entire proscenium of the Four Seasons Centre, and the piece definitely stood to gain in impact and beauty from the enlargement of the visual image.

However...

A patron sitting just in front of me and a few seats to the right began coughing right during the opening moments of the film, when the dancers are discovered by the camera even before the music begins. And coughed again. And again. And kept right on coughing, for almost the entire film before finally getting the sense to get up and leave to get a bottle of water. By which time the film was ending. "Mad enough to spit nails" about sums up my reaction. That thoughtless person totally ruined that piece for me. Sigh. It's a pity because the dance work and the videography are both intense and evocative in equal measures. But just try to maintain concentration on the screen with that storm of coughing going on not 3 metres in front of you.

At the time of its first presentation, March 2020, Crystal Pite's Angels' Atlas already impressed as a stunning example of dance fused with extraordinary visual components.  Today, it remains all of that -- and then some -- but strikes me even more as a fitting metaphor for our gradual emergence out of the darkness of the last year and a half.  

Like Pite's previous work for the company, Emergence (but for very different reasons), Angels' Atlas is very much more than just another dance work.  I'm sure that I am far from being the only person in the audience who responded to this extraordinary vision at an intense, gut-level of emotional impact.

 

The impact of Angels' Atlas is a tripartite collaboration -- the dance, the lighting design (including the extraordinary light show on the backcloth), and the music. 

 

Pite's choreography retains many of the signature touches familiar from Emergence -- the short, choppy movements, the repeated pulsations as single body parts moves over and over in the same cycle, the entire company moving in unison and then breaking off into subgroups. Also notable is the quick yet smooth transitions from the whole company to a pas de deux, which then morphs into pas de trois or pas de quatre, and so on. In Pite's own words, "I'm trying to create something...that evokes a fierce pulse of life."

At first, it seems that the serenely evocative choral music of Tchaikovsky (Cherubic Hymn) and Lauridsen (O magnum mysterium) is ill-suited to this kind of dance language. But as the dance and the music proceed together, the long-held vocal notes and sharp, repeated movements fuse together into a continuum whose ends are clearly marked, but whose central remainder has yet to be clearly seen or felt. Owen Belton's original score for the second section of the ballet creates a more mysterious and haunting sense of space, time, and eternity, freeing itself from the strictures of place and culture which the more Christian ethos of the religious works invariably imposes.

The third and most striking element of the trifecta is the lighting plot, and the backdrop light show. For anyone old enough to remember the impact of witnessing Stanley Kubrick's landmark film, 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen when it was new (1968), the same awesome sense of infinity attends Jay Gower Taylor's design and concept for the backdrop. Although this light show unfolds in pure white rather than colours, it draws the entire work with it into a timeless realm of glowing power, almost a literal equivalent of Shelley's "white radiance of Eternity." 

Since both the title and Pite's own notes about the work make clear that she was also intrigued by the contrast of our limited here-and-now with the limitless possibilities of the eternal, it seems plain to me that Angels' Atlas has succeeded beyond all measure in taking the audience into that exact place, the place where certainty gives way to speculation, and limitation becomes possibility. I dare say this may sound very pompous to some people, but this most definitely is not your common or garden variety of modern dance, no matter how you approach it.

In this work, the company displayed extraordinary unanimity in meeting Pite's need for the entire group to "pulsate" as one, with hands, faces, shoulders, or whatever all moving right together. Also very evocative, particularly so, was the first pas de deux which emerges out of the first full company section. 

Although Serenade and Angels' Atlas couldn't be more different in their essential natures, there are still some significant connections between them. Both are company pieces, both demand of the company a strong sense of moving together and standing together, and both make use of light as a key structural and emotional component of the entire work. You can add Soul to the list, too, because of the striking and evocative use of light and shadows in the filmography of the work.

In the strength of the company's responses to both main works, it was easy to see that this return to the light was as significant and life-enhancing for the dancers as for the audience. I think this performance will linger long in the memories of those fortunate enough to see it.

Serenade and Angels' Atlas with Soul remains on stage at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto until November 27.

Toronto Symphony Orchestra 2021-2022 # 1: Gustavo's Official Debut

The next item on my bucket list for the return to live performances was the official opening programme of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra's 100th season.  This programme also marked the first appearance, in a live concert, of Gustavo Gimeno in his role as the orchestra's tenth Music Director.

 

Of all the performing arts organizations, I suspect that the orchestras of the world had the most to lose during the lengthy pandemic shutdowns. Actors, dancers, and individual musicians of all kinds could continue to put their work before the public through adroit use of electronic media, but for an orchestra there is no effective substitute to being together in a single venue, listening to each other and watching the conductor, welding themselves into a single musical organism.  That's also true of choral singing, for all of the same reasons. 

Right at the outset, then, I took my seat in Roy Thomson Hall, eager to hear how the orchestra sounded as a single body following on their year-and-a-half enforced hiatus.

For the first time I can recall, we faced a vacant stage. A few minutes after eight, the doors opened and the entire orchestra marched on, triggering the most enthusiastic applause of the evening, with many patrons standing and a great deal of cheering. Speaking for the audience, I think that said it all about our feelings.

The programme was intriguing, because it was developed to meet some special conditions:

• Total concert time no greater than eighty minutes, with no intermission.
• Works that could be played by a reduced orchestra of 50, allowing more spacing on stage.
• Works that could convey an atmosphere of celebration and endurance.
• Representation of composer of colour.
• One work each from the 1700s, 1800s, 1900s, and 2000s, the decades during which the independent concert orchestra as we know it (beyond simply being used as an accompaniment for singing) has grown and evolved.
  

 

The last two points weren't mentioned in any of the advance publicity I saw, but became clear as the concert progressed.

 

The evening opened with the Canadian premiere of Invictus by Anthony Barfield. Composed in response to the shocking murder of George Floyd, Barfield's work takes the form of a stunning, powerful, sometimes acerbic fanfare for the brass instruments. The title refers to the composer's own belief, speaking for himself and the whole black community, that "despite these troublesome times, we are in fact unconquerable." The TSO's brass section gave a stirring account of this gripping work.

For the second work, we went back to the earliest end of the programme's time line. Franz Josef Haydn, the man often celebrated as "the father of the symphony," was represented by an unusual aspect of his vast output -- the overture to his opera, L'isola disabitata ("The Deserted Island"). The music is undeniably dramatic, with some modulations that seem startling until you realize that it was written during the height of the middle period of his career when Haydn was often occupied with the ideals of the Sturm und Drang ("storm and stress") movement in composition. Indeed, the stormy opening of the overture suggests a possible shipwreck before the allegro main section launches. "Launches" is the appropriate word, as Maestro Gimeno lit the fuse of a rocket with a tightly-disciplined takeoff.

The third work, representing the 1900s, was Paul Hindemith's Concert Music for Strings and Brass. This work was composed on a commission for the Boston Symphony Orchestra's 50th season in 1931, and is designedly a work for public consumption -- but a strikingly thorny one. I can't resist the urge to quote from Volume 6 (1939) of the Essays in Musical Analysis by Donald Francis Tovey, who's one of my favourite writers on music (not that I always agree with him by any means):

 

Alas and alack-a-day, Hindemith, in his new Anweisungen zur Tonsatz, expressly repudiates atonality and polytonality, in terms which give no support to the idea that he ever used these privileges, even in early works. Still, facts are facts....

Tovey then goes on to describe a 1921 work for chamber ensemble in which a popular fox-trot dance tune is quoted in G major, while simultaneously accompanied by identical runs on the major scales of all the other eleven keys of the octave.

 

The Concert Music makes very free use of polytonality, with the strings and brasses occasionally (and rather painfully, for my money) playing very fully-harmonized melodies at the same time in two or more conflicting keys. I've had to sit through it twice in the last decade, and should be very happy never to be called on to repeat the experience.

As for the quality of the performance, that's hard to judge without closer familiarity and a copy of the score. The bigger, grander passages lacked for nothing in power and force. Gimeno's control of the quieter passages, where momentum could easily be lost, made it clear that the music was still moving forward in precise fashion. Apart from that comment, I can only observe that everybody arrived at the "right" chord together at the ending -- and then move on.

Schubert's Symphony No. 5 in B-Flat Major concluded the concert by fulfilling what is by no means an easy requirement: finding a symphony from the nineteenth century which would still keep the concert under that 80-minute total time frame.  I have an easier time thinking of nineteenth-century symphonies which would blow out of that time frame all by themselves!

With the smallest orchestra of any of Schubert's symphonies, the Fifth also brings a beguiling Mozartean atmosphere. But it is not easily mistaken for Mozart, all the same. The profusion of ingratiating melody could come from few other hands than Schubert, and the same can be said for some of the intriguing modulations. Although neither dramatic nor grand, this little Fifth always strikes me as a songful delight.

The opening movement begins in full flow, allegro without a slow introduction, but is most unusual in opening pianissimo. Maestro Gimeno here led the only live performance I have ever heard in which that pianissimo was fully respected, yet that didn't preclude some sharp little sforzando accents which managed to get louder without getting louder, to intriguing effect.

The second movement, Andante con moto, definitely moved as directed, but at the same time conveyed an atmosphere of drowsy relaxation which felt somewhat like the slow movement in Beethoven's Pastorale, although there's no musical resemblance. Here, Gimeno notably managed to incorporate the slightest and gentlest of rubato so that the music breathed organically, with the entire orchestra coming right along with him.

The Menuetto third movement was played as a scherzo in all but name, an explosive, fire-eating reading such as I have never heard, and the first truly loud sound in the entire symphony. In Gimeno's performance, Schubert's role as a precursor of Bruckner's mammoth scherzos was clearly audible. The trio, by contrast, came at a tempo more relaxed than the menuetto, where many conductors maintain much the same basic pulse throughout the movement. 

The light-hearted, joyful finale flew by quickly in a rush of happy, giddy celebration.

The concert as a whole was a splendid celebration of the return to live performance, and the well-filled hall attested to how badly the music lovers of Toronto had missed the privilege.

The best news was the realization that the orchestra was in as fine form as ever, playing with unanimity and musicality to burn under their new Music Director. The future of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra as we come out of the pandemic seems assured and bright indeed.

Fascinating and Diverse Styles of Dance

Today, another performing arts company takes a first bow in this blog.  On the weekend, I travelled to Kelowna, British Columbia, to see the first live-audience show since the pandemic by Ballet Kelowna.

 

This is a small company with just eight dancers, but under the guidance of their Artistic Director, Simone Orlando, they definitely create a large impact on their audiences.

The program consisted of three works by contemporary Canadian choreographers, although -- as it happened -- all three made at least some use of classical music in scoring their works.

 

The evening opened with the world premiere of Kirsten Wicklund's The Forever Part.  The recorded music track made use of Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (played by brass instruments), and of the Aria da capo from the same composer's Goldberg Variations on piano.  A central section between these bookends used an electronic score created by Wicklund.

 

This dance work, with its title implying meditation on things too big for humans to personally know, made extensive use of a stage prop not often seen in dance performance -- carpets.  Every time one of those carpets was rolled out, and a corner was left poking up slightly, I found myself worrying that one of the dancers would trip on a carpet and execute a graceful face-plant (which is exactly what I would do in that situation!).  In any case, the carpets added visual interest to the bare stage as well as stimulating questions in the viewer's mind.

 

The same was true of the complex lighting plot.  The performance opened with a series of brief, dramatically lit vignettes, succeeded in turn by blackouts while the dancers relocated themselves.  This peculiar procedure certainly reflected the episodic character of the opening pages of Bach's Toccata and Fugue but it did nothing to help me feel that the work was actually getting under way. 

 

Once the blackouts were over, the piece did move along more satisfactorily.  On the whole, I found this first section of Wicklund's work hard to warm up to, as I felt that the choreography could have taken fuller advantage of the dramatic extremes in Bach's score.

 

Once the Toccata and Fugue ended, Wicklund's electronic score took over and created sounds evocative of mysterious distances in space, time, and thought.  At this point, the dance brought us into the meditations that the title of the piece suggested, in choreography which became at times much more subdued and subtle. The final entry of the Aria da capo led into a lovely, evocative pas de deux which brought the piece to a suitably satisfying conclusion.

 

The second work was commissioned by Ballet Kelowna and originally staged in 2019.  Heather Dotto's Petrushka, made use of selected fragments of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score combined with electronic soundscape effects.  Rather than try to mount the story-ballet original, Dotto has chosen to merely sketch in the highlights of the story and focus instead on the loss of control inherent in becoming or being a puppet.  

 

The eight dancers in the piece each take turns at being human or puppet, and also take turns manipulating or being manipulated by each other.  One of Dotto's most evocative images was the sight of the eight puppets seated shoulder to shoulder in a row, all slouching or flopping slightly in different ways.  They were sitting on the stage floor, but I could have sworn that I could see a shelf which they were perched on.  This use of the physicality of puppets is one of the key requirements for the dancers in this piece. 

Playfulness was the keynote of much of Dotto's choreography, as was a rubber-elastic ability to stretch and twist the body into all sorts of odd configurations.  Another endearing image, used twice, was the vertical row of heads, one above another, all observing the one dancer who wasn't lined up in the stack.  Several comic vignettes were created by having faces or bodies suddenly snap into freeze-frame positions.

 

The last one-third of Petrushka suffered from an apparent loss of direction, and from excessive sameness compared to what we had seen before.  In the end, the piece ended, not with a bang but with a whimper, quietly and unexpectedly -- and that ending led me to suspect that the seeming aimlessness may have been deliberate.

This Petrushka, perhaps best described as a sideshow riff on the original, was both entertaining and involving precisely because it was like nothing else I had ever seen.  Although it had its comical moments, I was left overall with a feeling of sadness at how little control any of the puppets (or us) really have in life.

The final work, after the intermission, was another world premiere: Celestial Mechanics by Robert Stephen.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST ALERT:  Robert Stephen is my nephew.

 

This work used the entirety of Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 12 in A-flat Major.  Not one of the master's better-known works, this sonata certainly represents, in its four movements, a uniquely experimental approach to musical form -- an approach reflected in the dance.

 

Unlike the other two works, this piece made use of a classical-modern fusion of dance styles, with pointe work incorporated. 

It was hard to watch this dance work without recalling George Balanchine's famous dictum:  "See the music; hear the dance."  Not that Stephen's work looked much like anything Balanchine did or might have done, but the flowing, seamless musicality of his choreography and the degree of integration with Beethoven's musical muse and intentions were both intense and unmistakable.

 

That flowing character was helped not a little by the use, in varying degrees, of costumes using long, full, flowing skirts by both male and female dancers.  Nor did the un-gendering of the work end there, as numerous moments involved men lifting men, women lifting women, women lifting men, and multiple more breaks from the classical traditions of who does what on stage. 

 

The first movement, a theme and variations, brought us a sequence of dances: a solo, a duet where the first dancer was joined by the second, a duet where the first dancer was replaced by a third, then the second replaced by a fourth, the third by a fifth, and finally another solo to round the piece out.

 

The second and fourth movements, both high-energy and highly rhythmic scherzos in character if not in name, were matched with equally energetic movement.

 

The real heartbeat of the work came in the sombre third movement funeral march.  The intensity and darkness of the music found a perfect counterpart in Stephen's poignant choreography, and were increased by the use of universally dark costuming.  In the final moments, the sweeping of the skirts became a positive swirling storm, presaging the final movement's emphatic discarding of sorrow.  Overall, it was the sheer humanity and compassion of the dance that made the third movement such a  memorable highlight of the evening.

In closing, I must praise the overall intensity and commitment as well as the skill of the dancers in the Ballet Kelowna company.  All eight members were involved in the first two pieces, while the final work did let two of them have a breather.  It was a terrific amount of high-intensity, high-stakes dancing for this small group of artists and they presented it magnificently.  Kudos to the dancers and to Artistic Director Simone Orlando.  Kelowna's dance lovers have a real treasure in this company!

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir 2021-2022 # 1: With a Song In Our Hearts

With the coming of November, the first performing arts season in nearly two years is getting under way.

 

Arts organizations are finally planning live audience performances, and audiences are buying tickets and preparing to return to a whole world of beauty, excitement, and involvement that had seemed lost to us.

 

As luck would have it, my first live experience of the season happens to be with the dean of performing arts organizations in Toronto: the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir.  Founded in 1894, the Choir is still going strong and, if anything, is stronger now than ever.

 

In recent years, the only events with this Choir which I've attended have been when the Choir appeared as guest artists with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.  It seems fitting, therefore, that this first return to the live stage after the pandemic should have featured a chamber ensemble drawn from the Orchestra as the guest artists of the Mendelssohn Choir.

 

It was a night of considerable excitement for another reason: the first public appearance of the Choir under its newly-appointed Artistic Director, Jean-Sébastien Vallée. 

 

For due levels of caution, the performers were spread out more widely than usual around the front and side sections of Yorkminster Park Baptist Church, and the audience was restricted in size to allow for adequate spacing of audience members.  All performers and audience were required to be fully vaccinated and masked.

Also with caution in mind, the concert was available as a pay-to-view live stream, for those who did not yet feel comfortable attending in person.

 

Even with these necessary accommodations to remind us of the ordeal we've all been going through, the sound of live voices and instruments lifted up in glorious song was enchanting, and spoke deeply to places in our hearts that had been feeling the lack -- more, perhaps, than we cared to admit.

 

Enchanting was also the right term to describe Nathaniel Dett's brief oratorio, The Chariot Jubilee (composed in 1919).  Dett was born into an African Canadian family in Niagara Falls, but spent most of his life living in the United States, conducting and teaching music at several traditionally Black colleges there.  It seems reasonable to suppose that The Chariot Jubilee was written for performance in such a setting.

In this concert, the work was performed by choir and soprano soloist in a recent chamber orchestra arrangement by Jason Max Ferdinand.  This work definitely merits rehearing, and it would be good to hear the oratorio with full orchestra and tenor soloist, as the composer conceived it.

The keynote to Dett's style in this, and many of his works, is the fusion of the European idioms of the Romantic era with the melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic character of spirituals and other folk music of the African American diaspora.

 

This performance of The Chariot Jubilee began with a radiant, deeply-felt, unaccompanied performance of the spiritual Swing Low, Sweet Chariot by soprano Jonelle Sills.  Upon her final note, the orchestra stole in quietly with an evocative instrumental prelude.  After several minutes the choir, and soloist joined in again.  Much of the music was written in a lyrical idiom which fitted the tone of the spiritual, and of the text written and compiled by Dett himself.  Contrast came from two faster episodes, one somewhat dramatic, and the other definitely dance-like in character. The spiritual was then developed in an extended passage with interesting modulations, and the work ended with a quick, exhilarating final coda crowned by Sills' soaring voice rising above the choir.

Music Director Jean-Sébastien Vallée held the performance firmly together throughout Dett's oratorio, no mean achievement in an episodic score which keeps changing its character and tempo, sometimes very frequently.  The choir gave the music a splendid reading, radiant in the quiet passages and energetic in the faster music -- particularly in that dance episode. 

 

The main offering of the concert, Ein Deutsches Requiem, Op. 45 by Johannes Brahms, is too well known to require detailed commentary from me.  The chamber orchestra arrangement used here was created in 2010 by Joachim Linckelmann, and was previously unknown to me.   

 

Reducing the original full Romantic orchestra used by the composer to a small ensemble of 19 involves inevitable losses as well as gains.  The extra clarity and audibility of the woodwind parts was a true bonus, as these often get swamped by the strings in a full-orchestra performance.  On the downside, the lack of trombones was the biggest single loss.   Yes, I know all the hoary musician's jokes about trombones, but it's good to remember that Brahms always employed these instruments with considerable discretion, and only at key moments in each score.  Here, I most missed them in the menacing crescendo of Denn alles Fleisch and at the splendid Denn es wird die Posaune schallen -- where Brahms, incidentally, followed Luther's German Bible to the letter in employing the trombones (Posaunen) rather than the Last Trumpet(s) normally used by other composers.

Overall, the use of such a small body of players with such a large choir might seem like a miscalculated risk, but in fact the balance was well-nigh perfect because the choir had to wear masks throughout the performance.  Here again, we had gains and losses.  The masks softened the volume and edges of the choral tone just enough to keep the singers from overwhelming the small chamber ensemble.  The drawback, of course, was that the text was hard to hear (even for me and others like me who have sung the Brahms), and the Choir's usual splendid and precise diction was, alas, missing in action -- through no fault of their own, I hasten to add.

Music Director Jean-Sébastien Vallée led what could largely be considered a "central" performance of this masterpiece, avoiding either fast or slow extremes of tempo.  The gear shifts within movements were all handled with care and precision, and (in the sixth movement) without drawing undue attention to the fact that the shifts are occurring. The more lyrical fourth and fifth movements were especially notable for a fluidity and ease of motion which is by no means the rule.

The one weak link was also the one moment of extremity, when he adopted a hell-for-leather tempo in the resounding fugue of the third movement, Die gerechten Seelen.  Given the wide physical spacing of the performers, a slight reduction of speed here would have led to far firmer results without the occasional looseness of ensemble.  But that was a minor issue in an overall fine performance.

Baritone Brett Polegato gave a noteworthy performance of the solos, projecting a clear understanding of the texts and their implications which is ignored by many singers.  The concept that he was singing the music like German lieder springs to mind.  This was particularly true of the long and complex text for the soloist in the third movement.   This is the first time I can ever remember, in a live concert of this work, wishing that the baritone had a bigger part.

Soprano Jonelle Sills seemed less comfortable in Brahms than in Dett.  Admittedly, the composer tosses the singer a nasty problem by making her sit still for 45 minutes or so, then enter quietly and far too high for comfort in her range -- when her voice has had ample time to get cold.  Sills, on the whole, did her finest work in the bigger passages, remaining always audible alongside the choir.

Throughout the entire 75-minute span of the work, the Mendelssohn Choir remained thoroughly on point and produced lovely tone in all dynamic ranges from the quiet of the opening through to the glorious final cadence of the magnificent sixth movement.  Their fluid phrasing of the melodic lines in the fourth movement was an especial delight.

The program title for the concert, "Coming to Carry Me Home," draws an obvious link with Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.  The connection with Brahms might seem less obvious, at a quick glance, but it is there nonetheless -- above all in the pivotal fourth movement, Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen ("How lovely are thy dwellings").  The texts in both works point us towards a place of comfort and healing, a place that all of us are truly in need of finding in these times.  

Not only, then, a timely plea for comfort -- this concert also provided a radiantly beautiful introduction back into the world of musical performance for all of us.  I'm sure that the performers, no less than the audience, went out into the night with a song in all our hearts.