From the Podium: Heaven and Hell
Dear friends and supporters of Pro Coro Canada
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you today to this musical exploration of Dark and Light, of Hope and Despair - of Heaven and Hell. I’ve given much thought as to the thread through this concert program and would like to share some of my ideas.
First, the momentum in both halves of the concert is of an ascending nature. Part I ends with the work by Stuart Beatch, proclaiming the resurrection of Christ, whereas Part II ends with Dante re-surfacing from Hell, a secular resurrection of sorts. The parallels of these two texts are fascinating when we look at how the story unfolds for the protagonists (Christ, respectively Dante).
Resurrectio talks about the singular moment of Christ’s resurrection, while supporting texts from the scripture add scenes from the Nativity, the Passion, and the Last Judgement. Donne’s poetry provides a secular underpinning, a naturalistic, scientific depiction of the transformation of Christ in those three days between Crucifixion and Resurrection. Dante, in his poem Inferno, started on the evening of Maundy Thursday with the descent into the underground. The next full day (Good Friday) was spent exploring the depths of Hell with Virgil as a guide. Dante and Virgil spent the following day ascending from Hell to see the stars. They arrive back on earth at the shore of the Mountain of Purgatory on the morning of Easter Sunday (Canto XXXIV).
Another perspective on the program selection is the balance between despair and hope from the first to the second half. With Mendelssohn and Poulenc, we are exploring death and darkness, in both secular and sacred ways. Poulenc’s Soir De Neige (Paul Eluard) was written over Christmas 1944, in German-occupied France, and depicts a desolate place, frozen in time. There is an energy within the music that reaches up in an anguished and dissonant manner. But this human protest does not succeed when we hear in the last line ‘le froid brûlant m'eut bien en main.’ (the burning cold holds me firmly in its hand). Psalm 22, in Mendelssohn’s version, is the well-known text My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?. The composer introduces the words with a solo voice in a minor key and sorrowful character. The choir, split into two sections acts as commentator but also emphasizes the emotional thread of the text. It is interesting to compare this version of the Psalm 22 by Mendelssohn with the same text, used by Handel in the Messiah. The new Testament finds the outcry ‘my God, my God’ also in two Gospels (Matthew and Mark), when Christ is on the cross, as part of the Seven Last Words.
The other motet by Mendelssohn presented today, Mitten wir im Leben sind mit dem Tod umfangen ("In the Midst of Life we are in Death") is a Lutheran hymn. Written by Martin Luther himself, it is based on the Latin antiphon "Media vita in morte sumus". The opening of the concert based on these lyrics provides an abrupt start to the meditation on Hell. The composition ends with an idea of church bells to the word Kyrie Eleison (Have Mercy).
Galina Grigorjeva is the first moment of light and hope in an otherwise dramatic and sombre first half. The music of the Ukrainian composer is tightly linked to Slavonic sacred music as well as early European polyphony. Grigorjeva "orchestrates" the voices with skill to create beautiful harmonic flickers amidst the fluid texture. There is a lot of air and space for breathing in her music, which provides a transparent interpretation of the In Paradisum text. We have found her music to be exquisit and her works will continue to appear on our programs.
In comparison, the second part of our concert develops the idea of Heaven, Peace and promised Paradise. The opening is a vibrant, solitary prayer that grows to a broad declaration of thanks and devotion to peace in Paradise. This hymn, based on an old shape-note tune, leads into the rendition of the Spiritual We shall walk through this valley in peace. Arranged by Moses Hogan, this tune refers to the Book of Revelation, but also reaches into the troves of the Psalms (Ps 23 in particular), and makes a connection to the first half and Ps 22 in the setting of Mendelssohn.
We remain in heavenly spheres with William Harris’ Faire is the Heaven for double choir. The words are taken from Edmund Spenser’s An Hymn of Heavenly Beauty. Harris selected lines from only three stanzas of a poem over forty stanzas in length. The words describe a moment of pure joy, where the only question arising is who would be more faire in the face of God. There are many angels and archangels, Cherubims and Seraphims competing for this place within the heavenly kingdom, and each tries to out-do the other. Interestingly, the work starts in a grounding and rich DFlat Major to which it returns at the very end. In the faster middle section, the flurry and fiery light gives grounds to explore many related key-signatures. We find ourselves excitedly observing the back and forth, but the arrival in the original key gives us a sense of the everlasting and secure power of God.
Similarly to the placement of In Paradisum by Grigorejva as the light filled pillar after darkness (Mendelssohn and Poulenc) and before the resurrection (Beatch), we find Es ist Genug by Sandström as convulsive, dark pillar after the peaceful and heavenly atmosphere of Dalglish, Hogan and Harris before the ascension from Hell in the second half. We have started to explore the music of this Swedish composer recently and find the treatment of the voice very intriguing. Each singer has to explore the extreme range of the voice in extreme dynamics. The musical material is simple per se, and the harmony moves at a slow pace with easy to anticipate changes. The individual lines though are weaving around each other in great dissonances. The repetitive iteration ‘it is enough, Lord’ becomes a meditation for the listener and the performer alike, and is as much a repose as it is a plea. A final solo line by the tenor quotes a Swedish folk song with the words ‘flowering, beautiful dales, the home of my heart’s peace’, which beautifully weaves back to the Spiritual by Hogan, but also contrasts with the image of nature’s decay in Poulenc.
The piece-de-resistance is the seminal work by Invar Lidholm … a riveder le stelle. Written in 1974 for the Swedish Radio Choir and the Eric Ericsson Chamber Choir (64 singers combined), it made an impression as large-scale, contemporary a cappella work for the period following minimalism. As referred to above, the poem by Dante evokes chaos and suffering. Lidholm does not hold back when depicting Dante’s images through music; the voices sing with full force, with strong emphasizes, and in close, dissonant intervals. The notion of climbing out of hell is present throughout the music, several times starting with the lowest voices in the bass and stepwise moving from note to note to the highest sopranos. This treatment also results in much of the musical cluster, as the low pitches remain while others move up. The most glorious moment though is the arrival of Dante and his guide Virgil back on the surface, on Easter morning, beholding the dark firmament clustered with stars. The music sways back and forth between two sonorities, while a soaring voice reaches high for the stars. As listener and performer alike, we’re spellbound while we try to grasp the immense beauty of Heaven.
Thank you for joining us this afternoon and for exploring with us the musical magnitudes of Heaven and Hell.