Camerata opens the program with pieces of primarily American composers sung in English and Hebrew. For many around the world who adhere to Judaism, this week is a holy one as Rosh Hashanah was celebrated and Yom Kippur is next week. These pieces weave Psalms, secular poetry, and sacred wisdom into a view of how we might see beauty in the world and appreciate it. Most importantly, the wisdom imparted advocates for self-awareness of errancy, the folly of self-centeredness, and to above all embrace unity, justice, and mercy. There is so much beauty in life – both in the natural world and within our neighbors – and we have a great duty to remember our role in saving it; to “keep all we can.”
Elohim Hashivenu is a constituent piece of Hashitim Ashed li-Shelomoh (translated as “The Song of Solomon,” however none of the pieces contain text from their namesake), which is a noted collection of pieces by Northern-Italian composer Salamone Rossi and his only known efforts in writing sacred vocal music. Rossi was an employee of the Court of Mantua and is recognized for his contributions to the development of the trio sonata and the chamber duet; he was a violinist and likely an accomplished singer. With his contemporaries (e.g.: Monteverdi), he wrote music that fit in the transition between the Renaissance era and the burgeoning practices of the Baroque era. The four-part psalm setting featured today is representative of his more conservative side, featuring modal polyphony interspersed with unified sections of homophony.
O God, restore us, and cause your face to shine, and we shall be saved.
-Psalm 80
Ma Tovu was penned in 2006 by Shulamit Ran on the occasion of her son’s Bar Mitzvah, as was the complimentary piece from her collection of Four Festive Songs which will be presented later in the program. Briefly similar to the Rossi piece, Ma Tovu begins with polyphonic imitation but proceeds to a more contemporary homophonic texture. Shulamit Ran effectively uses modal mixture and mixed meter to drive the piece forward in a devotional but joyful manner. Ran is a Pulitzer-Prize-winning composer whose works have been performed by many of the world’s top ensembles. Her style is extremely varied, from atonal symphonic works and virtuosic instrumental pieces to the more modally stable examples on our program today. Ran was previously Composer-in-Residence of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Lyric Opera. She taught for many years at the University of Chicago.
How fair are your tents, O Jacob, your dwellings, O Israel.
-Numbers 24
Haze Gold is from Philip Glass’ Three Choruses for Mixed Voices (1964) and dates from his early career – before going to study with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, before forming the Philip Glass Ensemble, and when minimalism was nothing more than an idea to come. Haze Gold was commissioned by the Ford Foundation’s Young Composer Project for the Pittsburgh Public Schools and sets poetry by Illinois’ own Carl Sandburg. There are some elemental glimpses of Glass’ later style in this work, like the repetitive eight-note murmurs and expressive tonality shifts. Ultimately, it presents the idea of holding on to the good and beauty we have – like savoring autumn before winter – and does so with creative musical textures that display the choir’s sensitivity to text and sound alike.
Sun, you may send your haze gold
Filling the fall afternoon
With a flimmer of many gold feathers.
Leaves, you may linger in the fall sunset
Like late butterflies before frost.
Treetops, you may sift the sunset cross-lights
Spreading a loose checker-work of gold and shadow.
Winter comes soon–shall we save this, lay it by,
Keep all we can of these haze gold yellows?
-Carl Sandburg
The Blue Bird was composed in 1910 by Charles Villiers Stanford, an Anglo-Irish composer, conductor, and teacher of many important composers at the Royal College of Music. The piece sets the poem L’Oiseau Bleu by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge (1861-1907) and is the third of the Stanford’s eight partsongs (Op.119 No. 3). It is strophic in form, consisting of two verses with the Sopranos independent of the rest of the homophonic chorus parts. The melodic movement is in stepwise intervals at the beginning of each verse and harmonized with delicate dissonances. Like a bird flying across the cold and still waters, each of the verses climax with the sopranos depicting the bird’s flying wings with intervallic material contrasting the previously stepwise character of the melody. The music ends with a coda, which is a repetition of the opening phrase.
In the description of leading Stanford scholar Jeremy Dibble, “The diatonicism of Stanford’s harmonic language…shows a considerable degree of sophistication and refinement as demonstrated in his immortal setting of Mary Coleridge’s The Bluebird. This sophisticated diatonicism, combined with lyrical flair, is a predominant feature of his music.”
Stanford was a prolific and versatile composer of the late nineteenth century in England, though his musical roots were in Germany where he studied each year and carried back a thread of admiration of both the classicist and (less so) modernist German compositional schools – Stanford was particularly fond of the work of Johannes Brahms, whom he met and aided by performing Brahms’ music in England. He composed more than 200 works including oratorios, symphonies, operas, sacred anthems, partsongs, chamber music, organ, and piano works. He is most enduringly known outside of the UK for his contributions to Anglican liturgical music, which were, along with Anglicanism, exported during the twilight of the British Empire. In addition, his tutelage of the “who’s who” of British composers like Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Howells, and others cemented his influence as a secondary or precursory figure in the English Musical Renaissance.
The lake lay blue below the hill.
O’er it, as I looked, there flew
Across the waters, cold and still,
A bird whose wings were palest blue.
The sky above was blue at last,
The sky beneath me blue in blue.
A moment, ere the bird had passed,
It caught his image as he flew.
-Mary Elizabeth Coleridge
Hatzneiah Lechet, also from Shulamit Ran’s Four Festive Songs, brings a contemplative and urgent sense to the text from Micah, which outlines our responsibility to be just, merciful, and humble. Phrygian flavor, unified text declamation with further emphasis indicated by unison singing, litany-esque setting of “walk humbly” and brilliant high points on the text “with your God” add vivid color to this bit of Old Testament wisdom.
You have been told, O humanity,
What is good and what God requires of you,
Only to do justice and to love mercy
And to walk humbly with your God.
-Micah 6
Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms are one of his most popular offerings for chorus. Typically performed with orchestra or chamber ensemble, we present the third movement today with piano solo. Bernstein was commissioned to write Chichester Psalms by the Dean of Chichester Cathedral, Walter Hussey, and completed the work in 1965. It actually premiered in New York before Chichester. Bernstein was particular about several elements of the score, including his insistence that the sung language be Hebrew, and that the choir be comprised of males. Most specifically, the beautiful second movement solo was meant for a boy treble to sing. The musical material was adapted primarily from previously abandoned compositions for musicals. What arrived, though, was a convincing and communicative piece that is rhythmically vital and beautifully lyrical. The third movement reiterates the urge to humility (like the previous piece on our program) and insists on the goodness of living together in unity. Musically, it opens with a dissonant recollection of themes from the first two movements, then shifts to a tranquil and simple “song” that is shared between the two halves of the choir. Of note is the seamless and natural use of the unconventional 10/4 meter, which underscores the majority of the third movement.
Lord, Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty, Neither do I exercise myself in great matters Or in things too wonderful for me to understand.
Surely I have calmed and quieted myself,
As a child that is weaned of his mother,
My soul is even as a weaned child.
Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and forever.
-Psalm 131
Behold how good and how pleasant it is,
For brethren to dwell together in unity.
-Psalm 133
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Concert Choir performs music that explores night, beginning with the advent motet by Brahms, asking for a savior to rip open the heavens. At the conclusion of the fourth verse (there are five verses total), the petitioner pleads to be saved from bitter death and greatest distress. Brahms ends this verse on a major chord, but not in our ‘home’ key for the larger piece, which signals the absence of a conclusion. From there, we move directly to Lauridsen’s setting of Neruda’s Soneto de la Noche, a love poem to a partner that may someday be left behind and an ode to the beauty of a life shared – a recollection of joys used to look forward beyond death. As our musical ‘night’ continues, we transition to Ešenvalds’ Only in Sleep, on poetry by Sara Teasdale. This piece, featuring solos by Ava Nagel and Sommer Jones, recounts childhood memories in dreams, where “time is forgotten.” Ešenvalds and Teasdale also wrote the music and poetry for Stars, vividly describing the night sky, and remarking that to observe such is a great honor. From death, longing, dreams, celestial majesty and all that night gives (and takes) from us, we move to MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn, which pleads for light to come, for day to break the night, for light to shine on the shadow of death, for a new beginning. The MacMillan is interrupted by the fifth and concluding verse of the Brahms, which sings gratitude and praise for the expected redemption and light returned to life. Upon the true conclusion of the Brahms, we are greeted with the entrance of the piano and then the choir, with Lili Boulanger’s dramatic and striking depiction of a sunrise: “Crowned in splendor, it rises, it soars; the awakening of the earth is a hymn of love!”
Johannes Brahms’ O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf (Versus I-IV) is the second of the two opus 74 motets, which are treasured pieces in the a capella repertoire. In O Heiland, Brahms deploys techniques reminiscent of Bach’s practices (particularly cantata no. 4), weaving sophisticated counterpoint around a chorale melody in variation format. In each verse, the contrapuntal compositional craft is used to express the imagery in the text – a fairly straightforward opening verse of motivic imitation, followed by a flowing second verse (water), a staccato and ‘bursting’ opening of the third verse that ‘flowers’ into triplet rhythms and the most demanding range for the sopranos, and a fourth verse with heart-wrenching chromatics and weeping two-note slurs. The fifth and final verse, which will be heard later in the program, exhibits a canon in inversion between the soprano and the bass; the final amen is a double inverted canon between the halves of the choir – an exuberant and excited setting of praise and thanksgiving in a musical expression akin to Bach, who was overt in glorifying God in all of his works. The motets were dedicated to Philipp Spitta, a biographer of Bach. (Credit to Alwes, A History of Western Choral Music, chapter 14)
O Saviour, tear open the heavens,
flow down to us from heaven above;
tear off heaven’s gate and door,
tear off every lock and bar.
O God, a dew from heaven pour;
in the dew, O Saviour, downward flow.
Break, you clouds, and rain down
the king of Jacob’s house.
O earth, burst forth, burst forth, O earth,
so that mountain and valley all become green;
O earth, bring forth this little flower;
O Saviour, spring forth out of the earth.
Here we suffer the greatest distress;
before our eyes stands bitter death.
Ah, come lead us with your powerful hand
from this misery to our Father’s land.
Morten Lauridsen’s Soneto de la Noche is from the choral cycle Nocturnes, written in 2004. This simple and well-loved setting leaves the expressive duties primarily to the text, which Lauridsen accompanies with perceptive rhythmic treatment, his trademark added-note sonorities, sensitive use of inversion, and melodic motives that weave between voice parts. One of the notable traits of this piece is how low it sits in all of the voice parts: it is an overlooked aspect of this piece’s expressiveness, which from the outset is intended to be simple and tender. Pablo Neruda, a Chilean poet of the 20th century, is well-regarded and known for his love poems. Soneto de la Noche is the 89th of his 100 love sonnets.
When I die I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me one more time
to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny.
I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep,
I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind,
for you to smell the sea that we loved together
and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked.
I want for what I love to go on living
And, as for you, I loved you and sang you above everything,
for that, go on flowering, flowery one,
so that you reach all that my love orders for you,
so that my shadow passes through your hair,
so that they know by this the reason for my song.
-Pablo Neruda, tr. N. Lauridsen
Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Only in Sleep was commissioned by Kent Hetteberg for the University of Louisville in 2010. It took the choral world (and beyond) by beautiful storm several years later when Trinity College Choir of Cambridge University released a video of the piece that was visually stylish and stunningly sung. The evocative descriptions in Sara Teasdale’s poetry are complemented by a simple folk melody and a chord progression that is optimal in its ability to elicit the warmth, comfort, and familiarity of childhood friends in a dream.
Only in sleep I see their faces,
Children I played with when I was a child,
Louise comes back with her brown hair braided,
Annie with ringlets warm and wild.
Only in sleep Time is forgotten —
What may have come to them, who can know?
Yet we played last night as long ago,
And the doll-house stood at the turn of the stair.
The years had not sharpened their smooth round faces,
I met their eyes and found them mild —
Do they, too, dream of me, I wonder,
And for them am I, too, a child?
-Sara Teasdale
Ēriks Ešenvalds’ Stars is another vivid marriage with Teasdale’s poetry, this time depicting celestial beauty through star-shot chord voicing, diatonic dissonance, and other-worldly accompaniment from a small glass harp.
Alone in the night, On a dark hill
With pines around me, Spicy and still,
And a heaven full of stars Over my head
White and topaz And misty red;
Up the dome of heaven Like a great hill
I watch them marching Stately and still.
Myriads with beating Hearts of fire
The aeons cannot vex or tire;
And I know that I Am honored
to be Witness Of so much majesty.
-Sara Teasdale
James MacMillan’s O Radiant Dawn is from his Strathclyde Motets, a collection of sacred pieces he gifted to University of Strathclyde in Scotland, where MacMillan lives. O Radiant Dawn was premiered by St. Columba’s church in Glasgow and the text is the antiphon for the 21st of December. Simple in its harmony and effective in its expression, the piece has attained status as a standard in both sacred and concert contexts. MacMillan is a prolific and well-regarded composer of concert music and sacred music alike. For many years, when he was not traveling the world to premiere his works with world-class ensembles, he could be found faithfully leading the music in a small church near his home.
O Radiant Dawn, splendour of eternal light; Sun of Justice: Come, shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.
Johannes Brahms – O Heiland, reiß die Himmel auf: Versus V
Therefore we all want to thank you, our Redeemer, for ever and ever. Therefore we also want to praise you at all times, always, and forever. Amen.
Lilli Boulanger’s Hymne au soleil was premiered in Paris, 1913. The text is from Paria by C. Delavigne. Boulanger was the first female winner of the prestigious Prix di Roma for composers and was the sister of the famous teacher Nadia Boulanger.
Let us bless the power of the reborn sun.
With all the universe let us celebrate its return.
Crowned with splendor, it rises, it soars.
The waking of the earth is a hymn of love.
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Howard Eckdahl 