Thursday 21 April 2022

Toronto Mendelssohn Choir 2021-2022 # 3: Sacred Music For a Sacred Space

The Good Friday concert, Sacred Music For a Sacred Space, given by the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir and the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, presented an unusual and even dramatic instance of how a long-planned live concert or performance can be overtaken by the march of current events.
 
This concert was planned last year, around the intention to present the complete All-Night Vigil, Op. 37 by Sergei Rachmaninoff, as the centrepiece and major offering. But now, in recent weeks, we are faced with the invasion by Russia of Ukraine. 
 
Demands to alter the programme so as not to present "Russian music," if any such demands had been presented, have fortunately been ignored. And the issue has been addressed in the programme notes by pointing out firmly that the art, music, and creativity of the Russian people, especially in the past, are certainly not invalidated by the actions of the current regime. I agree.
 
More to the point, we as humans have learned absolutely nothing from the events of the last century if we again allow knee-jerk hate to govern our reaction to these events with demands to purge everything "Russian" out of our sight and hearing.
 
And with that, let's get on to the significance of the actual programme, which is in danger of being overshadowed by this issue. The thread which ties this entire concert together is the conception of music which, because of its religious connotations, represents a source of strength and comfort to which people can turn in times of trouble and thankfulness alike.
 
Not least of the significance here was the inspired decision to present the concert in collaboration with the Nathaniel Dett Chorale, a Toronto-based choir which specializes in performing music from African traditions, particularly the music of the African diaspora communities in North America. Under the leadership of their Music Director, D. Brainerd Blyden-Taylor, the combined choirs opened the programme with a group of five pieces rising from the tradition of the spirituals, the intensely moving music evolved in oral tradition in the slave communities of North America during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As Blyden-Taylor explained in his spoken introduction, slavery in the traditional sense may have ended but spirituals continue to be sung because the needs which inspired them have not been cleared away from our societies today.
 
Deidre Robinson's arrangement of Steal Away gave not only long-breathed, soaring vocal lines, but also a first taste of an exceptional degree of commitment and involvement that marked the entire evening.

Crucifixion, by Adolphus Hailstork, brought contrasting energy infused with the agony of the scene depicted, and underlain by the frequent repetitions of "My Lord" like the tolling of great bells -- finally rising to a climax of intense power.

Mary Was the Queen of Galilee followed, in an arrangement by Wendell Whalum, The gentle soprano voice of Ineza Mugisha led off with the first lines of the spiritual, then taken up by the choir. Later, she returned to sing the final verses, her soaring voice underlain by the quiet murmuring of the other singers.

The last two numbers in this group, Don't You Weep No More, Mary and Go Not Far From Me, O God were both composed and/or arranged by R. Nathaniel Dett. The first featured strong, forthright singing from the choristers in a march-like, affirmative style befitting the Easter story retold in the text. In the last number, baritone soloist Andrew Adridge sang clearly and firmly in a middle verse that layered his voice amid the textures of the choir, and again in the contrasting concluding section.

An addition to the programme inspired by current events was the Prayer for Ukraine by Mykola Lysenko to a text by Oleksandr Konysky. The first verse of this beautiful 1885 composition was sung under the direction of conductor Simon Rivard at this point, and the second verse at the end of the entire concert.
 
Next we came to the major offering: the All-Night Vigil. For many years, this magnificent 70-minute work for unaccompanied choir was known in the English-speaking world as the "Rachmaninoff Vespers," a true misnomer -- as the service of "Vespers" occupies only the first six numbers of the work. It's a 15-movement collection of settings of all the canticles sung during the entire "All-Night Vigil" service which begins, in the Russian Orthodox Church, on the night before Easter Sunday and ends at dawn on Easter Sunday.
 
Many experts state that this is the greatest integral setting of the 15 canticles of the Vigil ever written. It is certainly an extraordinary landmark in the repertoire for unaccompanied choir.
 
It's a rather curious musical product to come from an avowed atheist. Rachmaninoff, indeed, did all he could to make this work, composed in just two weeks early in 1915, liturgically suitable by using the traditional chants prescribed for nine of the canticles as a basis for his composition. He then composed what he described as "conscious counterfeits" of the chant style to create the other numbers, thus giving the entire cycle a striking unity of tone and purpose. It's this pervasive use of the traditional chanted music of the Orthodox Vigil service that gives this music its air of seeming out of time and place with the world in which it was born, a timeless atmosphere which it shares with another great twentieth-century work for choir rooted in traditional religious chants, the Requiem of Maurice Duruflé.
 
It's worth recalling that the music of Rachmaninoff (and the All-Night Vigil in particular) suffered from the official disapproval of the Communist regime in Russia from 1917 to 1990. The composer voluntarily declared himself an exile from Russia after the 1917 Revolution, and he never returned. No public performance or recording of the Vigil was allowed in Russia for over four decades, and when a recording was at last authorized by the Communist authorities in 1968, it was only available for musicologists and other experts to study, not for general public use. In the English-speaking world, meanwhile, the music was long available only in a corrupt edition packed full of errors in transcription. 
 
The entire work was sung in this performance in the original Church Slavonic text, an ancient liturgical language of both the Orthodox and Catholic Churches.

Throughout the entire work, Simon Rivard led the choral forces in exploring all the power and inward intensity of the music. The very opening, Priidite poklonimsia exploded in an ecstatic outburst of sound, while the second movement, Blagoslovi, dushe moya brought the most gentle of murmurs from the choir, underlying the serene voice of mezzo-soprano soloist Rebecca Claborn. This in turn was followed by the beauty of the repeated cries of Alliluiya in the third movement -- each time clearly enunciated as written, as a five-syllable word.

And so it went throughout the entire cycle, moments of peace and inward reflection alternating with explosions of joy, expressions of awe and serenity contrasted with divine power and glory. 

Tenor soloist Nicholas Nicolaidis soared gently but clearly in the fourth and fifth movements, his solo line in the Nïne otpushchayeshi contrasting to spine-tingling effect with the choral basses' descending scale to a notoriously challenging, quiet, low B flat in the final bars. 
 
The spectacular crescendo and diminuendo in Shestopsalmiye was shaped to perfection, with the tone remaining firm and steady even as it faded back into the pianissimo in which it began.
 
The eighth movement, Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi brought the most dramatic contrasts between the repeated murmured prayers and the glowing retelling, verse by verse, of the Easter story -- again featuring Nicholas Nicolaidis as the voice of the angel at the tomb. The radiant Alliluiyas at the end of this movement come from a traditional Easter hymn which Rachmaninoff would revisit in the intense and dramatic concluding pages of his final completed work, Symphonic Dances for orchestra, 25 years later.
 
Perhaps the loveliest choral sound of the entire evening came in the fivefold refrains of Chestneyshuyu Heruvim during the Velichit dusha moya Ghospoda ("Magnificat") in the eleventh movement. 

Lightly touched in but unmistakable were the staccato notes at the end of Slavosloviye velikoy which give a clear effect as of chiming bells.

The entire performance reached its stunning climax in the powerful vocal glories of the final movement, Vzbrannoy voyevode.  
 
Beyond any doubt, conductor Simon Rivard and the combined forces of the Nathaniel Dett Chorale and the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir had the full measure of this uniquely intense music.

Curiously, the second verse of the Prayer for Ukraine, which followed to end the concert, seemed almost constrained in its more traditional vocal structure, after the expansive and free-flowing music of Rachmaninoff. But it was unquestionably the correct emotional note on which to conclude one of the finest and most moving choral concerts I've heard in recent years.
 
For anyone who missed the concert and would like to view an archived copy of the live stream, it is still possible to purchase a pass and view the programme online until April 30, at this link: