The Amadeus Choir of Higher 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 of among the many twentieth century’s choral masterpieces.
The Might 4 live performance takes place within the atmospheric Metropolitan United Church, performed 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 chunk 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 referred to as “selective verses from Psalms” slightly than specializing in Psalm 2. It will 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 elements to be sung in Hebrew. In actual fact, he makes use of the rhythms of the Hebrew language to information the melody, together with the jazzy components 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 twelve-tone music 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 outcome was the Chichester Psalms which is probably the most accessible, B-flat majorish tonal piece I’ve ever written.”
Maurice Duruflé: Requiem, Op. 9
A famous organist and trainer on the Paris Conservatoire throughout his lifetime, as a composer, Maurice Duruflé left a listing of solely 11 revealed works on his loss of life. Because of almost crippling self-critique and self-doubt, his output was painfully gradual.
“I work slowly, and I throw rather a lot 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 an alternative needed to put in writing a Requiem Mass. He was nonetheless working away on the undertaking 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. Probably the most generally recognized model is Gregorian chant. Duruflé had attended a choir faculty 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 totally composed on the Gregorian themes of the Mass for the Useless. Generally the musical textual content was fully revered, the orchestral half intervening solely to help or touch upon it; generally I used to be merely impressed by it or left it fully. Typically, I’ve sought above all to enter into the attribute model of the Gregorian themes.”
Plainsong can be notable for its unmeasured rhythms. “The robust beats needed to lose their dominant character with a view to tackle the identical depth because the weak beats in such a manner that the rhythmic Gregorian accent or the tonic Latin accent may very well be positioned freely on any beat of our fashionable tempo.”
He continues,
“This Requiem shouldn’t be 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 typically 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 function. 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.
