Light in the shadows

Light and darkness. Shadows and highlights. Ornate buildings take on a whole new character at night when the daytime sun no longer illuminates the building. The planners of tonight's concert--one of the fifteen performances in the Summer Music Festival 2005 at the Washington National Cathedral--opted not to illuminate brightly the performance space, but to allow the elaborately carved walls and ceilings of the cathedral to form a dramatic, changing, chiaroscuro backdrop for the sixteen a capella singers of "Phoenix." Light and darkness continued in the music, as well, as the group sang alternating movements of darker contrapuntal music from a 16th century Christopher Tye Mass with contemporary 20th century motets about lux, or "light." In addition, during the first half of the concert, the setting sun continued to shine through the stained glass of the clerestory windows, not only allowing the liturigcal portrayals in the windows to glow and later darken, but also casting beams of colored light through the upper part of the sanctuary. Those beams reminded me of the symbolism of light in gothic style churches that dates all the way back to the construction of the Abbey Church of St. Denis, the very first gothic building in the Middle Ages, and its creators' studies of the philosophy of Pseudo-Dionysius, who taught that symbols such as light and beauty move us towards God.

It was in this mystical space that we heard tonight's concert. What was particularly interesting was the performance location within the vast cathedral. The previous two series concerts I'd attended put the performers in the crossing and the audience in the nave. Tonight, though, the organizers set up hundreds of chairs in the Great Quire, and the singers stood in the sanctuary to perform. Between the permanent stalls for choir and chapter and the supplemental chairs set up in the aisles between the stalls, I estimate that there was seating for 450-500 people (it should tell you how big this place is if you remember this is just the choir or chancel area of the cathedral!). It's a very interesting space, being fairly long and narrow and approximately four stories high. In the area of the stalls, the lower half of the walls are of highly carved walnut and walnut paneling, with artistically arranged organ pipes on each side, and above that white limestone with a heavily ribbed ceiling and stained glass windows on the clerestory level. The sanctuary, of course, is largely of sculpted white marble with limestone and stained glass in the top half. The special intimate acoustics of this area of the cathedral were soon to lend themselves to the delicacy of this all-a capella concert.

Phoenix is a group of young-ish church musicians drawn from across the northeast coast, and it has been performing across the country since 1996, specializing in English choral music. They have an interesting mix of singers, with nine men (one is a counter-tenor) and seven women, plus a conductor. They entered the sanctuary to stand behind black music stands in a large semi-circle, parts mixed, with all the gentlemen in black tuxedos and the women in a variety of styles of conservative long black dresses, and the conductor in a cream dinner jacket. I noticed an interesting thing about the group: they were all brunettes!

The first half of the concert was devoted to Tye's Mass Euge Bone, opening with the 16th century John Taverner's "Kyrie LeRoy" and then between each of the Mass movements, they sang contemporary "lux" motets, namely "O nata lux" by Morten Lauridsen (b. 1943), "Lux Aurumque" by Eric Whitacre (b. 1970), and "Lux AEterna" by Edwin Fissinger (1920-1990). This interplay made for quite an interesting balance of moods. The choir was at its best with the contemporary motets. The pianissimos and diminuendos of "O nata lux" were particularly beautiful. I didn't know the lux motets, so I can't say much about the works or the composers other than the fact that they shared a contemporary British feel in their chordal structures and harmonies, and some of the passages felt very familiar, reminding me of some of the British anthems I've sung by other composers. The Tye Mass presented some interesting challenges for the group. Now, I don't want to give a negative impression of the group, because their mastery of the music and their level of artistry far exceeds what we generally hear from church and collegiate choirs. Music from the 16th century can be very challenging for modern choirs to sing, since that era of music expected a trained singer's voice eventually to "solidify," and to lose any wobble, tremolo, or vibrato; modern operatically-trained singers tend to strive for such vibrato. This group also used female singers, but we should remember than in the 16th century, the high parts were sung either by boys choirs or by castrati, since a papal decree forbade women from singing in public. Music written for castrati will be hard for modern women to sing because not only were soaring high notes put in, but castrati were particularly prized for the richness of their lower registers, and few modern female sopranos will have that kind of range. In the Taverner, the singers were particularly careful to enunciate their consonants, giving us especially explosive K's for repetitions of "kyrie," and that made me hopeful for the rest of the concert. Unfortunately, though, the diction lost crispness in many of the more elaborate sections of the Tye Mass, and that was often quite noticeable in the lower voices during some of the melismas. I also had the feeling that several of the women were working hard to hold their voices back, since some entrances felt shaky and almost cracked. They were doing that, though, to blend in, stop the vibrato, and keep their voices from sticking out, and I must say that overall, the blend of the choir was very pleasing.

For the first half of the concert, we sat on the fifth row back from the altar rail. During the second half, we moved and sat twenty rows further back on the next to the last row of the chairs in the choir, just in front of the rood screen. While the closer seat gave us a better feel of the voices as they entered during the contrapuntal sections and the individual personalities of some of the singers, the seat further back not only gave us a better overall blend, but gave us more of a sense of the cathedral's reverberant "echo". It would have been nice to have had a chance to go out into the nave to hear the sound from out there, as well, but perhaps we can do that for another concert. The second half of the concert was devoted to three of the great British composers of the 20th century. They opened with Charles Villiers Stanford's "Magnificat, anima mea," his long Latin version (not one of his Mag and Nunc settings for Evensongs) that I've never thought was very exciting. Next was a "Chorale after an Old French Carol" by Benjamin Britten which was pretty, but the diction was so blurred I could not swear that they were actually singing the English words in English. Finally, they did Herbert Howell's Requiem, a little known work hidden by the composer until shortly before his death thought to be a response to the death of his son and a preliminary study for Howell's big festival piece, Hymnus Paradisi. The two major portions of the Requiem are settings of Psalms 23 (rather forgettable) and 121 (very nice), with two variations on "requiem aeternam" in between, and all flanked by a "Salvador mundi" up front and "I heard a voice from heaven" at the conclusion The baritone (who looked a lot like the British actor Rupert Graves) and tenor soloists had opportunities to shine in Psalm 121. The first "requiem aeternam" variation had a lot of nice pedal tones from the basses, and the second variation had some of the very few soaring, "big" moments in the evening's performance.