Advent 2024 - Magnificat

This Advent I am singing with a new choir in town - SOLI DEO GLORIA. What is amazing about this choir is that anyone who has a desire to sing Oratorio music can join, no experience necessary. This group sings with joy and passion of the amateur; that is doing it for the love of the art form and not as a job. I think you will be able to sense this at our performance December 1st!

We are performing 2 works that work together well thematically and span the centuries. First is Bach, Cantata 142 Uns ist ein Kind Geboren which proclaims the baby who will save us all has been born. There are beautiful arias, a great orchestral opening movement and 3 choral movements. Short and joyous and so very Bach - it will snag you immediately and pull you along all the runs and trills - completely exhilirating! Then will come Rutter's Magnificat. Opposite to Bach. First of all, unlike Bach, Rutter is a living composer and British. Though both are fans of the accidental and both have settings of the Magnificat you will never mix up the two. Bach has been my friend since I was a little girl and so before the orchestra has completed the first bar I am already in love. Rutter is a composer I have only learned to sing as an adult and I find all his time signature changes and occasional dissoance difficult to sing. I have to work so much harder at it - yes, as I mentioned - amateur choir. Still all the rehearsals have paid off and I have come to appreciate this piece very much. I am impressed with Rutter's very deliberate matching of music and text. First of all what is Magnificat? It comes from the opening lines of Mary's joyful prayer upon hearing the news that she is the to be the Mother of God's son. She begins, "My Soul doth Magnnify the Lord" How this newly pregnant teenager could rejoice instead of lament is one of the biblical mysteries. In Rutter's musical setting of Mary's words you will find incredible word painting. Mvt. 1 - My soul doth magnify the Lord: and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour. For he hath regarded the lowlineess of his hand-maiden: for behold, from henceforth All generations shall call me blessed Although we will sing this in latin you will immediately experience the exuberant joy in the opening lines, the lines about the lowly hand maiden will be subdued and beautiful. The music beautifully matches the text throughout this work. In mvt 5 you will immediately tell when the haughty are being scattered by our rapidly descending phrases followed then by the gently raising up phrases as the humble are being exalted. Wow, Mr. Rutter, such a perfect marriage of music and text! In the 6th moement comes the healing balm of the phrase "Suscepit Israel puerum suum" - (God in his mercy has helped his servant Israel.( I am close to tears when singing this line or when the soloist sings it, oh yes, there is a beautiful soprao solo in this piece, as there should be! Whoever heard of Mary being an alto? Marni Enns sings these lines beautifully! She alone is worth the price of admission. When you are sitting in the pews you will find your own striking examples of words and music working together to communicate the message of a young teen-age girl's outpourings so many years ago. Though the choir is ameteur the conductor, orchestra and soloists are not. Yuri Klaz will conduct the dynamic orchestra and soloists and weave us choristers into the mix with his magic baton. Come and experience the joy!

Passion Performance Preparation

This post is a glimpse into how I prepare for a performance during passion season. Tonight the Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir is performing two beautiful works with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. They are Te Deum by Dvorak and Brahms' Requiem. I started the day by mixing up my Paska dough while listening to Bach passion chorales. The Paska receipe comes from Irmgrad Baerg, beautiful accomplished pianist who I admire greatly. While the dough rises I spend 20 minutes on the treadmill while simultaneous watching a Te Deum performance on youtube, link above, and singing along, confirming that I do have it memorized - hooray!

This is my first time singing this work, in fact prior to rehearsals I had not even heard it. I must say it is a beautiful composition ; very joyful! Our performance is very much enhanced by soloists Lara Ciekiewicz and Greg Dahl. I have heard them both perform many times and performed other works with them and they add a lot of sparkle and pizazz! Lara is always generous with praise for the choir which aids in our performance. We especially need this type of endorsement as our conductor, Yuri Klaz, is not really that impressed with us, having numerous complaints about our intonation, timing and dynamics. "A right note at the wrong time is a wrong note" It may interest you to know that a wrong note at the right time is also a wrong note. Since his visage is more glowering than glowing when he looks upon us from his podium, we are lapping up any praise we can from soloists and orchestra to keep us going. Personally, I have prepped by using www.cyberbass.com in the initial stages for the Te Deum and when that is mastered I sang along with the video recording above and my score, to eventually be doing it sans score. Of course, what one can manage in one's own living room, fortified by red wine, is not always replicated on the stage with the orchestra blasting all their insturments. The altos are placed very closely behind the trumpets and trombones which can be quite distracting at times, what with all the blasting and saliva. Also they are a rather jocular group telling jokes between blares. For Brahms I did not need to prep with cyberbass or recordings because it is a work I am very familiar with. I did however have to spend time doing excercises that gradually crescendo and descrescendo. Practically every bar of this Requiem has a crescendo and descrendo in it - which one must pay attention to but we fail at this over and over again. During rehearsals many of us just blast right through 2 bars, then go subito piano. It is difficult to maintian this constant rise and fall but it is what Brahms is all about. At last night's dress rehearsal I think we mostly managed this correctly. When you come tonight I would be interested to hear your feedback on this point. One of the highlights is to see how much our conductor basks on the podium to the sounds coming from the orchestra. There is a beautiful dynamic between orchestra and Yuri that is satisfying to watch. He is really in his element jabbing his baton and casting magic spells. The musicians are showing him respect and a spirit of collegiality abounds. This is far from always the case and it is thrilling when it happens!

Summer Fallow

Here I am in another summer dry season.  No performances nor rehearsals.  The usual depression was staved off by copious amounts of German beer
whilst cheering on the German team during World Cup 2014. I share three loves with Pavarotti:  music, food and football. (soccer to our North American minds)
Now that Germany has hoisted up the cup I must return to normal life and this, said normal life, is harder to bear without the sweet hours of rehearsal in it.
What is a chorister to do? 
Time to look ahead at the upcoming Season.
1.   First off will be rehearsals for church Advent concert, but I don't know what that will be yet. 
2. in mid December will be Handel's Messiah with Ivars Taurins!!!  I posted about this great Handel conductor in a previous posting and I am thrilled he is coming back and is working with our choir again.  Now that we know what he wants, his markings still relatively fresh in our minds, we will certainly be able to deliver a memorable performance.  Who can forget his unique musical marking of a squiggle over a group of notes.  Don't remember that from your theory classes?  Nope.  It is an Ivar marking meaning, "Do Something with these notes."  He also appreciates altos which gives him bonus points and clearly shows his worth as a conductor.  There will be two performances with the WSO, one will be a sing-along, which will have Ivars in Handel costume! Good times! 

3.  Britten's War Requiem in March with the WSO and Alexander Mickelthwaite, who, have I mentioned, is becoming better and better at conducting choirs and seeing that we are also part of the concert.  He has also raised his passion up a few notches and so I find him less Peter Pan-ish than I used to.  This will probably be the most challenging work for me in that it is not from the baroque or classical period and I have never performed, rehearsed, nor listened to this work.   The Symphony Orchestra season guide has this to say about it:
Using massive forces of musicians and singers, English composer Benjamin Britten had a message when he composed his War Requiem in 1961: “My subject is War, and the Pity of War. The Poetry is in the Pity...All a poet can do today is warn,” the title page shows in poet Wilfred Owens’s words, on which the work is portrayed. Owens was killed during the last days of World War I. Britten’s War Requiem is among the most powerfully eloquent testaments to Owens’s universal message of peace.
4.  Good Friday performance of Rutter's Requiem.  I have performed this once before but don't remember anything about it.  Last season our church choir performed the Rutter's Magnificat after which a conductor from the audience named us "the Rutter choir of Winnipeg", so I am confident that after many note slogging rehearsals we will be able to deliver a respectable version of this Requiem.

So what will this chorister be doing this summer? 

1. Sing along to favourite Arias in my living room just to know my voice is still there.  This last activity requires strategic timing, unless I don't mind my son bellowing in the background, "Turn that down! Stop singing!"
2.  Get a thrill when writing down rehearsal dates in my Calendar.  Might do this in two stages so as to prolong the pleasure.
3.  Listen to the two Requiems
4.  Perhaps order the Britten score

Stop Insulting Us!

     There is a movement, that has been around for a long time, to remove traditional 4-part hymn singing from the churches and to replace it with unison chorus singing.  When one tries to have a discussion of it the chorus singers always come down to " Well, it's okay because God loves all music.",  seemingly missing the point completely.  After all,  God loves our naked bodies too but that doesn't mean we all show up to church naked; at least that movement has not reached my congregation yet.
      People like myself do not only support the idea of keeping 4-part singing for the obvious comfort it gives to the old and vulnerable in our congregation but also because it is the job of higher institutions to give the masses something to aspire to.  If we dumb down the sermons or music we are insulting our listeners.   I really appreciate how the writer Daniel Gregory Mason explains this concept.
     I wonder if you have ever heard the story  of the great nature-lover, Thoreau, and the Indian arrowhead.  It was told by a friend of his who went with him on one of those long walks which he so loved to take all about the country  near Concord, and in the course of which he saw and heard such wonderful things.  The two men fell to talking of those rude arrowheads, chopped from stone, which are almost the only relics now to be found of the Indian tribes that used to hunt in that region; and Thoreau's companion expressed his surprise that any one could ever see, in those wide fields around them, such mere chips of quartz.  "Here is one now," replied Thoreau, stooping and picking one up at his friend's very feet.
     Thoreau was justly proud of his keen powers of observation and  used to explain it by saying that he knew what to look for.  "nature," he writes in one of his books, "does not cast pearls before swine.  There is just as much beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to appreciate- not a grain more....There is no power to see in the eye itself," he insists, "any more than in any other jelly.  We cannot see anything until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our heads."
     What is here so well said of the eye is equally true of the ear.  As there is indeed no power to see in the eye itself, so there is no power to hear in the ear itself.  We cannot see until we know what to look for; we cannot hear until we learn how to listen.  Yet how few people realize what care and study, what love and enthusiasm, are needed to make a good listener, especially to that rarest, subtlest form of sound - music!
      We often hear people say, for example, that they are fond of popular music but that what they call "classical music" is too dry and heavy for them.  They say this complacently, as if it were entirely the fault of the music, and their state of mind couldn't possibly have anything to do with it.  Yet the reason for their preference for the commonplace is that they are not yet trained to seize the more delicate beauty of a melody by Schumann or Chopin.  Let them cultivate their power of hearing by listening with their minds as well as their ears, and these rare, finer beauties will charm them more each day, while the old popular favourites will in the same proportion grow to seem more and more noisy, meaningless and stale. (taken from The Canada Book of Prose and Verse)
     I myself, am one who has only the most elementary form of musical training.  I have that aggravating amount that lets me know there is something there but what that something is, is usually beyond me.  I am still in the stage where I appreciate music with words more than pure music and that is because I need that guidance to understand the music.  I am not yet a sophisticated listener.
     Many of the advocates for unison simple singing in my circles are classically trained musicians.  They can afford to play these simple songs in church because they are exposed to classical music in other settings, but for many the church is their place of live music.  It is their only chance to expose their listening minds to more complex forms.  Popular music is available everywhere, you can't get away from it.  It can be used in Sunday School and Youth nights and all informal gatherings, so you don't need to come to a formal worship service to hear more of it.
      As stated. I have no formal music education and sing at the top of my lungs when watching the Mama Mia movie but because of exposure to good music in my church and home I can discern  that Bach's Mass in B minor is slightly more complex than ABBA's  Chiquita.  I know I am only catching a little of what Bach intended and the fact that there is so much more to discover is exciting to me.
     I really want our institutions like churches and schools to give people something higher to aspire to in all aspects of life.   Athletics, Art, Music, Academics, and Spiritual fulfillment.   If they don't, who will?