Saturday June 2nd and Sunday June 3rd 2007 4:00pm at the Unitarian Church

Featuring selections from Brahms' Ein Deutsches Requiem, Randol Alan Bass' Gloria, a selection of traditional spirituals, and more...... 

SING ME TO HEAVEN

          The choral works on today’s program explore many flavors of spirituality as only music is capable of doing, starting with the song that gives this program its title, “Sing me to heaven” (1999).  The text by contemporary sacred poet Jane Griner demands a musical setting, since its very point is that music’s transcendence succeeds where mere words fail.  The composer is Daniel E. Gawthrop (b. 1949), a native of Fort Wayne, Indiana, who has served as composer-in-residence to the Fairfax Symphony Orchestra in the Virginia suburb of DC, and has been the recipient of many commissions and grants for choral and organ works, including the piece on today’s program.

          The German Requiem (Ein deutsches Requiem, Op. 45) by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) is indisputably one of the towering masterpieces of the choral repertoire.  Its composition was prompted by the death of the composer’s mother in 1865.  It has been widely believed that the death of Robert Schumann in 1856 was the initial impulse that led to the work, but there is no hard evidence to support this claim.  Brahms had completed six of the work’s seven movements by the end of the summer of 1866.  The first three were performed in Vienna in 1867, but the first performance of the original six movements took place on Good Friday 1868 in Bremen.  Sometime after that performance, Brahms added the present fifth movement, completing the work as we know it.  It was first performed in that form at the Leipzig Gewandhaus in February of 1869.

          While Brahms is generally known to have been an agnostic, he was not without a depth of spiritual feeling that we find evident in the German Requiem.  It is not, of course, a liturgical Requiem, but a series of meditations on death and what may lie beyond death, using texts compiled by the composer from Holy Scripture.  In an essay of 1921, English writer and musician Ernest Walker insisted on the intensely personal nature of Brahms’s statement, appealing “straight from personal vision to personal intelligence” without reference to any official orthodoxy.  At the same time, Brahms’s outlook was at least as far removed from the facile, ideological atheism we find in some present-day writers.  Brahms knew the Bible intimately, and evidently he took it seriously.

          Today’s program includes the first and last movements of the German Requiem along with the fourth movement, which is easily the best known and most often performed separately.  It is familiar in English as “How lovely is thy dwelling place” (text from Psalm 84).  The first movement begins with a dark and haunting introduction to usher in words from the Sermon on the Mount:  “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.”  Brahms then links this with the beautiful image from Psalm 126:  “Those who sow in tears shall reap with joy.”  The theme of blessedness is taken up again in the final movement, but this time from the Book of Revelation:  “Blessed are those who die in the Lord ... for they rest from their labors.”  The first and last movements end with the same musical material.  The entire work seems to come full circle, as if the mourners and those who are mourned become linked in a mystical fellowship.

          Randol Alan Bass (b. 1953) has his roots in Texas.  A native of Fort Worth, he grew up in Midland and attended the University of Texas at Austin with subsequent graduate work in Ohio at the Cincinnati Conservatory.  He is currently director of the Metropolitan Winds of Dallas and often sings with the Dallas Symphony Chorus.  Perhaps it should not be surprising that his Gloria (1991) is a work of bold statements and big gestures.  The fanfare-like opening leads to a rhythmically vibrant, Spanish-flavored section in irregular meter.  These alternate with broadly lyrical passages supported by lush and flowing accompaniment.

          René Clausen (b. 1953) has been director of the Concordia Choir at Concordia College, Moorhead, Minnesota since 1986.  He is celebrated as a choral conductor, composer, arranger, and clinician, and is the founder of the René Clausen Choral School.  He held previous choral appointments at West Texas State University and Wichita State University, for whom he wrote the piece on today’s program.  “All that hath life and breath” (1981) is an exuberant work that takes its title and point of departure from the final verse of Psalm 150.  The rest of the text is adapted from Psalms 22 and 96.  Listen for the aleatoric passage towards the end, where the sopranos have a series of thematic fragments which are repeated freely by the individual singers over a sustained chord in the lower voices.

          Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943) hails from the Pacific Northwest.  He is professor of composition at the University of Southern California, and from 1994 to 2001 he was composer-in-residence for the Los Angeles Master Chorale.  He has been the recipient of numerous important awards, grants, and commissions.  Perhaps his most celebrated work is Lux Aeterna (1997) for chorus and orchestra.  Today’s program includes his wistfully introspective “Dirait-on” (1993).  While often performed separately, it is the fifth and final item in a cycle entitled Les Chansons des Roses, consisting of settings of French poems by the noted German poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926).

          “Flower of beauty” (1960) by English composer John Clements (1910-1986) is a delicate setting of a tender love lyric by Sydney Bell.  It seems to hark back to the tradition of the Victorian and Edwardian English choral part song, and is reminiscent of similar pieces by composers like Parry, Stanford, and Elgar.

          The tradition of the African American spiritual presents a very distinctive and unmistakable flavor of spirituality. Today’s program includes a group of three arrangements of traditional spirituals.  Two are by American choral legends Robert Shaw (1916-1999) and Alice Parker (b. 1925).  It is worth pointing out that the Shaw/Parker arrangement of “I got shoes” (1953) uses only the natural degrees of the diatonic major scale, with no chromatic alterations for color or modulations to other keys.  This simplicity of tonal diction, coupled with sophistication in the handling of choral textures, admirably suits the endearingly child-like vision of heaven embodied in the spiritual’s lyrics. The third of the group, “I’m gonna sing ‘til the Spirit moves in my heart” (1995) is one of many spiritual arrangements by the late Moses Hogan (1957-2003), whose devotion to this art form brilliantly continued the tradition so ably pursued by such African American composer-arrangers as Henry Thacker Burleigh (1866-1949) and William Dawson (1899-1990).

          The text of “I have had singing” (1993) comes from Ronald Blythe’s book Akenfield:  Portrait of an English                Village.  The vocal score is headed with the following note:

In 1961, Ronald Blythe visited the village of Akenfield (population 298) in order to record tales of the lives of English country laborers – farmers, pigmen, grave diggers, fruit pickers and the like – vanishing breeds in the face of progress.  He was startled by the harshness and beauty of their lives.

The words are quoted from Fred Mitchel, then aged 85, who was a horseman from the village.  He gives an eloquently simple and valedictory reminiscence of the singing that was so much a part of nearly every facet of village life.  His words are set to music by Steven Sametz, who is on the faculty of Lehigh University and director of the Princeton Singers.

          How better to end this program than with an exuberant romp in the form of John Rutter’s arrangement of the spiritual “When the saints go marching in” (1990)?  There may be shared subject matter between this song and “The trumpet shall sound” from Messiah, but there the similarity ends.  In contrast with the tonal simplicity of the Shaw/Parker “I got shoes”, Rutter’s arrangement has blue notes, chromatic coloration, and wild changes of key lurking around every corner.  Enjoy!

--notes by William J. Gatens

THE RENAISSANCE FAIRE OCTOBER 2005

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