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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
Kevin Fox
March 2, 2007
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Not Child's Play By William Quillen
The Pacific Boychoir scored a major triumph this weekend with its presentation of sacred music by Samuel Barber and Sergei Rachmaninov. Hearty congratulations are in order for the choristers and their artistic director, Kevin Fox, who reaffirmed the Oakland-based choir’s status as one of the Bay Area’s leading performing arts organizations.
The concert, heard Saturday evening at St. Augustine’s Catholic Church, paired two familiar works, each presented in a fresh and interesting way. Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, Op. 11, is a choral arrangement of his famous Adagio for Strings. The opportunity to hear this often-played instrumental work in its choral setting was welcome enough; hearing it sung by a chorus of boys and men, instead of a traditional mixed chorus with female soprano and alto voices, was an altogether new and fresh experience.
More significantly, the program presented the rare chance to hear one of the staple works of the 20th-century choral repertory, Sergei Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil (Vsenoshchnoye bdeniye) Op. 37, sung by a chorus of men and boys, the ensemble for which Rachmaninov designed the piece and premiered it at the Moscow Synodal School in 1915. This performance — billed by the Pacific Boychoir as the first American performances of the work using boy trebles — offered an exciting opportunity to rediscover this familiar piece in its unfamiliar original soundscape.
The concert opened with a solid reading of Barber’s Agnus Dei. The choir showed a full and impressive dynamic range, and capably met the extremities of soft and loud demanded by this piece. The cutoffs and articulation were impeccable, too. The group’s intonation, though, was not always on the mark. In the measures leading up to the piece’s tear-soaked climax, the top sopranos were jarringly out of tune on more than one occasion.
The overall impression, though, was powerful, and was helped along by a nice touch of theatricality: The choir sang the Agnus Dei from the church’s back balcony. The seemingly disembodied voices ringing throughout the resonant space, their origins obscure, were thoroughly haunting; the church’s Lenten austerity, notably the statues near the altar shrouded in purple, added to the solemnity of the moment.
The choir’s performance of the Rachmaninov All-Night Vigil was nothing short of magnificent. Throughout the concert, it was apparent that this marvelous group of young singers has been carefully trained and thoroughly rehearsed. Good choral habits were the rule. The choir’s diction was stellar, and the group easily navigated through almost an hour of difficult Old Church Slavonic. Admirable, too, was the way the group brought out textural changes throughout the composition. While much of the All-Night Vigil is homophonic, there are important shifts, and the choir responded accordingly. This was most evident during the fifth movement, “Nine otpushchayeshi” (“Lord, now lettest Thou), a Kievan chant setting of the Canticle of St. Simeon in which Rachmaninov employs imitative polyphony, a stylistic shift aptly highlighted by the choir. Most impressive, though, was the choir’s sound, which was full, powerful, and clear. The Pacific Boychoir’s soprano and alto singers were augmented by an excellent group of tenors and basses, including Pacific Boychoir alumni and boychoir members whose voices had recently changed. When the choir opened up into its full forte or fortissimo, the sheer sonic experience was chilling. This was most apparent at the doxology, which closes the third movement, “Blazhen muzh” (Blessed is the man). The full, powerful sound — clear and in-tune — nearly brought tears to my eyes. While the performance of the All-Night Vigil was altogether outstanding, there were two small problems. First, near the end of the piece — more specifically, after the lengthy 12th movement, when only three short movements remained — the choir seemed to have noticeably run out of steam. Their vocal fatigue is more than understandable: The concert was long and vocally demanding, and I attended the second consecutive performance, the same works having been sung the night before in San Francisco. More troublesome, though, was Fox’s flat and dramatically featureless reading of the piece. Throughout the performance, he seemed content simply to manipulate the dynamics. Over the course of any given movement, the tempi remained steady, predictable, and uninteresting. I would have welcomed a more determined, drastic interpretation. Throughout the evening, the choir responded immediately to any direction Fox issued from the podium. They doubtless would have responded convincingly to a wider palette of expressive directions, had he chosen to given them. When an individual movement had an inherent or obvious dramatic shape, Fox’s reading was stellar. For me, the most compelling part of the performance was the ninth movement, “Blagosloven yesi, Ghospodi” (Blessed art Thou, O Lord). This is a dramatic telling of Christ’s resurrection, in which separate quatrains narrating the events are introduced by the verse, “Blessed art Thou, O Lord; teach me Thy statutes.” Toward the end, this refrain gives way to the doxology. The choir’s performance was enthralling. Fox perfectly balanced the drones and hums in individual voice parts against the dynamic parts in the others, masterfully conjuring up the sense of divine, cosmic mystery described in this movement.
(William Quillen is a Ph.D. candidate in historical musicology at UC Berkeley.)
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