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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
November 2, 2003
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By George Thomson
Between the worlds of "early music" and "new music" exists a fascinating sort of multi-dimensional
shared space. On one side there is the-new-of-the-old, that modernist spirit embodied in the hopeful
phrase "at last, hear (such and such old piece) as the composer intended!" On the other is
the-old-of-the-new, which could encompass every compositional trend that has a neo- in front of it, and
then some. Both corners strike at a (real or imagined) center of orthodoxy, a muddle of accretion,
compromise and complacency sneeringly referred to as "tradition." The intersections between these orbits
have made for much interesting aesthetic discussion, and can result in some rather remarkable music too.
It seems fitting indeed, then, that the California Bach Society, that enterprising ensemble which is
staking out a position in the vanguard of "new-old" with its scrupulous presentations of liturgical
reconstructions, should open its season with a masterpiece of "old-new," the Kanon Pokajanen for
unaccompanied chorus by the Estonian Arvo Pärt. In a concert last Sunday at St. Gregory Nyssen
Church in San Francisco, the chorus of 26 and their director, Warren Stewart, gave the nearly
eighty-minute work a strong and provocative performance.
Pärt's music of the last two decades inhabits a very distinctive and consistent sound-world, one
whose affinities with the "early music" sound-world are obvious. The use of a systematic set of
compositional rules, involving extremely simple diatonic formulae, frequent repetition or recombination,
and subtle variation, evokes the medieval music so important to the composer. It also imparts a sort of
distancing layer, giving the performance something of the flavor of a reconstruction, if only of
something that never really existed.
There is of course an overt historical element to the 1997 Kanon Pokajanen (the "Canon of Repentance"), taking its text from an eighth-century liturgical poem from the Orthodox rite. This long and eloquent meditation on human sinfulness and yearning for redemption through Christ spans eight odes, or movements, supplemented by two extra prayers near the center and another prayer at the conclusion. Pärt's compositional technique (neatly discussed by Stewart in his erudite pre-concert lecture) derives melodic material from the scansion of the Church Slavonic text itself; accompanying voices are disposed according to strict procedures, and the whole work mostly inhabits the triadic world of D minor with a few chromatic inflections. Hearing the whole technique explained, one wondered, with its rigor, how the resulting work could have taken two years to compose; hearing such a relatively small set of formulae, a cynic might imagine the realization taking more like a couple of weekends. Yet there is something both more and less subtle at work in the music — the grandeur, the sheer audacity of the time-scale, and the intricacy with which the seemingly small pool of tonal possibility is constantly renewed. One becomes aware of complementary events over enormous stretches of time: an ascending scale as an element, and a descending one several minutes later, or the inversion of voices in an otherwise identical figure. When, towards the end, the tonal spectrum opens up suddenly to include something like five or six simulateous pitches, the effect is extremely powerful. Stewart and his forces achieved a wonderful unanimity of ensemble and blend of tone; one suspects that their rather cool "early-music" timbre, aided by the warm but not overly resonant church acoustics, would be more authentic for Pärt than the somewhat chestier sound of other Orthodox liturgical singing. They could muster plenty of power, though; the numerous full sections with widespread, doubled sonorities were often thrilling in their impact.
As detached and rigorous, in its way, as the style of this music is, one couldn't forget the human element in the performance. This stuff is hard to sing: the pitch started to rise almost immediately, hovered sharp for many minutes (straining the highest soprano voices that much extra), veered low during one passage for the men (in the "Ikos"), and eventually settled about a half-step below where it had begun. There were occasional patches that seemed a bit fatigued, and there was the odd disagreement about where to split a pair of vowels in the Church Slavonic. But these were trifles, and perhaps not out of place in such an extensive meditation on the subject of human frailty. Among the many luminous moments of the perfomance there stood out the mellifluous sections for three solo singers, rendered variously (but always beautifully) by soprano Ruth Escher, alto Suzanne Elder-Wallace, tenor Scott Whitaker, and bass Hugh Davies. The California Bach Society continues its season with three further programs: Christmas music of Francesco Guerrero in December, choral music of Brahms in March, and works of J. S. Bach in April.
(George Thomson is a conductor, violinist and violist, Director of the Virtuoso Program at San Domenico
School, San Anselmo.)
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