The Amadeus Choir of Higher Toronto will finish their 2024/25 season with a live performance on Could 4 that brings collectively Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. The 2 works are thought of among the many twentieth century’s choral masterpieces.
The Could 4 live performance takes place within the atmospheric Metropolitan United Church, carried out by Kathleen Allan. The soloists embrace:
- Alex Hetherington, Mezzo-Soprano
- Jesse Blumberg, Baritone
- Ryan Talebi, Boy Soprano
- Amahl Arulanandam, Cello
- Jonathan Oldengarm, Organ
- Zane Mallett, Harp
- Yang Chen, Percussion
Leonard Bernstein: Chichester Psalms
Reverend Walter Hussey, Dean of the Cathedral of Chichester in Sussex, England, wrote to Leonard Bernstein in December 1963. He requested a bit for the Cathedral’s music pageant, set for August 1965. The pageant efficiency would convey collectively the cathedral choruses of Chichester, Winchester and Salisbury.
“Many people could be very delighted if there was a touch of West Aspect Story concerning the music,” Hussey hinted in his letter, mentioning that maybe Psalm 2 could be appropriate.
Bernstein took on the problem, however used what he known as “selective verses from Psalms” slightly than specializing in Psalm 2. It could be the primary work he composed after the Third Symphony, Kaddish, which he accomplished in 1963 in reminiscence of President Kennedy.
Within the Chichester Psalms, Bernstein mixed parts of conventional Church music with Judaic liturgy, and his rating particularly requires the vocal components to be sung in Hebrew. In truth, he makes use of the rhythms of the Hebrew language to information the melody, together with the jazzy parts frequent to lots of his works.
The piece is basically tonal, in distinction with many items he was writing throughout that interval.
Bernstein commented on it throughout a 1977 press convention, “I spent nearly the entire yr writing 12-tone system and much more experimental stuff. I used to be joyful that every one these new sounds have been popping out: however after about six months of labor I threw all of it away. It simply wasn’t my music; it wasn’t sincere. The tip consequence was the Chichester Psalms which is essentially the most accessible, B-flat majorish tonal piece I’ve ever written.”
Maurice Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9
A famous organist and instructor on the Paris Conservatoire throughout his lifetime, as a composer, Maurice Duruflé left a listing of solely 11 revealed works on his demise. Because of almost crippling self-critique and self-doubt, his output was painfully gradual.
“I work slowly, and I throw so much away,” he wrote.
His Requiem, Op. 9, is a setting of the Latin Requiem for a solo baritone, mezzo-soprano, combined choir, and organ. He started the work in 1941, when the Vichy authorities, which collaborated with the occupying German forces, provided sizable commissions to pick French composers. Duruflé accepted with the intention of composing a symphonic poem.
However, as regular, his progress got here at a snail’s tempo.
Alongside the way in which, he deserted the thought of a symphonic poem, and as a substitute needed to jot down a Requiem Mass. He was nonetheless working away on the undertaking when the Vichy regime collapsed in 1944, and nonetheless engaged on it for one more three years till it was lastly accomplished in 1947.
The Requiem’s music is predicated in or plainchant, a monophonic sort of chant used within the Church. Probably the most generally recognized model is Gregorian chant. Duruflé had attended a choir college between the ages of 10 and 16, and was influenced by the modal harmonies and plainsong custom all through his profession.
To the venerable musical mode, he expands the melodic parts, and provides impressionistic harmonies. In his personal program notes, he wrote,
“This Requiem is solely composed on the Gregorian themes of the Mass for the Lifeless. Typically the musical textual content was utterly revered, the orchestral half intervening solely to assist or touch upon it; generally I used to be merely impressed by it or left it utterly. Usually, I’ve sought above all to enter into the attribute type of the Gregorian themes.”
Plainsong can also be notable for its unmeasured rhythms. “The robust beats needed to lose their dominant character with a purpose to tackle the identical depth because the weak beats in such a means that the rhythmic Gregorian accent or the tonic Latin accent might be positioned freely on any beat of our fashionable tempo.”
He continues,
“This Requiem just isn’t an ethereal work which sings of detachment from earthly worries. It displays, within the immutable type of the Christian prayer, the agony of man confronted with the thriller of his final finish. It’s usually dramatic, or crammed with resignation, or hope or terror, simply because the phrases of the Scripture themselves, that are used within the liturgy. It tends to translate human emotions earlier than they’re terrifying, unexplainable, or consoling future.
“The organ has solely an incidental position. It intervenes, to not accompany the choir, however solely to underline sure accents or to make one momentarily neglect the all too human sonorities of the orchestra. It represents the thought of peace, of Religion, and of Hope.”
- Discover extra particulars, and tickets, for the Could 4 live performance [HERE].
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Anya Wassenberg is a Toronto Metropolis Editor at Ludwig Van. She is an skilled freelance author, blogger and writing teacher.
