The Amadeus Choir of Larger Toronto will finish their 2024/25 season with a live performance on Might 4 that brings collectively Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms and Maurice Duruflé’s Requiem. The 2 works are thought-about among the many twentieth century’s choral masterpieces.
The Might 4 live performance takes place within the atmospheric Metropolitan United Church, carried out by Kathleen Allan. The soloists embody:
- 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 Facet Story in regards to 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” relatively 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 components of conventional Church music with Judaic liturgy, and his rating particularly requires the vocal components to be sung in Hebrew. Actually, he makes use of the rhythms of the Hebrew language to information the melody, together with the jazzy components frequent to a lot 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 virtually the entire yr writing 12-tone system and much more experimental stuff. I used to be completely satisfied 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 outcome 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 printed works on his dying. On account of practically crippling self-critique and self-doubt, his output was painfully gradual.
“I work slowly, and I throw quite a bit 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, supplied sizable commissions to pick out French composers. Duruflé accepted with the intention of composing a symphonic poem.
However, as standard, his progress got here at a snail’s tempo.
Alongside the best way, he deserted the thought of a symphonic poem, and as a substitute needed to write down a Requiem Mass. He was nonetheless working away on the mission when the Vichy regime collapsed in 1944, and nonetheless engaged on it for an additional three years till it was lastly accomplished in 1947.
The Requiem’s music is predicated in or plainchant, a monophonic kind of chant used within the Church. Essentially the most generally identified 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 components, 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 Useless. 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. Normally, I’ve sought above all to enter into the attribute model of the Gregorian themes.”
Plainsong can also be notable for its unmeasured rhythms. “The sturdy beats needed to lose their dominant character to be able to tackle the identical depth because the weak beats in such a approach that the rhythmic Gregorian accent or the tonic Latin accent might be positioned freely on any beat of our trendy tempo.”
He continues,
“This Requiem is just not 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 overlook 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 Might 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.