Duquesne Choir Concert
Epiphany Catholic Church
General Comments
The choice of concert venue has a huge effect on how a program will sound. Epiphany Church’s sanctuary offers ample reverberation and such live acoustics are a pleasure to sing in. It helps carry the voice throughout the entire space and can take the edge off any harshness while adding smoothness and warmth to a choral sound. For a relatively small group performing vocally demanding works such as Brahms’ How Lovely Are Thy Dwellings or Copland’s The Promise of Living, live acoustics are a huge help. But they can also have detrimental effects. Long reverberation times tend to blur diction and muddy rhythmically intricate passages. All of the above effects, good and bad, were in evidence during last night’s concert.
Pappert Women’s Chorale
Overall, the Pappert Women’s Chorale sang with a lovely, warm sound. Their Bach selection was affected most by the sanctuary’s long reverberation. As was generally the case with every piece on the program, diction was blurred significantly, sometimes rendering the words unintelligible, but the accompaniment for the Bach was also adversely affected. A harpsichord, rather than a piano, would have lent more clarity to the accompaniment, but, lacking the availability of one or someone trained in playing it, a lighter more detached touch on the piano would have helped. It also appeared that the accompanist got lost about half way through the piece, but to their credit, the singers kept things together until the accompanist got back on track.
The Mozart selection was much better suited to the church’s acoustics, as was the Nagy piece that the chorale premiered. The Nagy work, Eternal Peace, is a lovely composition, very well suited to the ensemble. The chorale performed the work with subtlety and sensitivity and from the work’s title, I assume it sets the text nicely – what a shame for the audience that the entire text was not included in the program.
Pappert Men’s Chorale
When they sang softly, the Pappert Men’s Chorale did so with a warmth frequently missing from men’s ensembles. Frankly, you don’t hear men’s chorales sing this soft very often, so this was a pleasant, unexpected surprise. When they sang louder, however, the sound was thin on top. Again, I sorely missed having access to the texts for Prayer of the Children and On Justice, Truth and Peace. Musically, the pieces were quite nice, but mostly, I had no idea what they were singing. I also question the decision of staging the ensemble to perform stretched across the chancel in a single row. The chorale didn’t seem accomplished enough to sing from this formation. I would have liked to hear them perform from at least a double row, where the singers could hear each other better and perhaps feel more a sense of ensemble.
Voices of Spirit
The Duquesne mixed ensemble began their portion of the program with Ne timeas Maria, a work by the Renaissance composer Victoria and the one piece on teh program best suited to the acoustics of Epiphany Church. The ensemble sang with length of line and sensitivity worthy of the music. From where I sat, it appeared they performed without a conductor, a decision I question – not because the performance suffered necessarily, but because I believe more could have been drawn out of the ensemble: shaping of lines, entrance of voices, approach to cadences – all could have been enhanced with a conductor. While the performance was lovely, more was there to be had.
Gerald Finzi’s My Spirit Sang All Day is on my list of favorite secular choral works (soon to be published in this blog), so naturally, I was very interested to hear the Voices of Spirit sing the piece. It was lovely – solid, expressive and obviously well rehearsed – the highlight of the evening for me.
Certain works require an ensemble of sufficient size with voices of sufficient maturity to supply the necessary “horsepower” to pull them off. The Brahms and the Copland selections on the program are two such works. This edition of Voices of Spirit lacked the size and maturity to accomplish the task convincingly. That is not to say the necessary additional voices aren’t enrolled at the Mary Pappert School of Music. I do surmise, however, they sing in Opera Workshop rather than Voices of Spirit. Can you say “politics”?
Final Thoughts
A comment should be made regarding the sparseness of program notes. The entire text for all the pieces on the concert should have been included in the program, especially Eternal Peace by Dr. Zvonirmir Nagy. And why was there substantial biographies for the accompanists, but no biographical information for Dr. Nagy? With a world premier performance on the program of a work written specifically for the Pappert Women’s Chorale, this strikes me as a huge oversight.
I have known and performed with both Craig Cannon and Guy Russo and know them both to be fine singers and musicians. It will be interesting to see how Duquesne’s choral ensembles develop under their direction.