Choral Scene

It may be partially true that with age comes wisdom. But it is certainly true that with age comes the inability to remember what one went down to the basement to retrieve. Upstairs you trudge again, retracing your steps until your memory is sufficiently jogged — oh right, duct tape — and you are ready to make the frustrating second trip. Perhaps what often passes for wisdom is in fact a mellow, philosophical acceptance of how many extra journeys for duct tape (or garbage bags or whatever) age and failing memory now require.

Myself, I’m finding that with age comes immaturity. Jokes that made me sneer with contempt in my high-minded teen years now make me snicker and guffaw. I look forward to the ongoing dismantlement of my critical faculties, until seeing Bugs Bunny in drag and Wile E. Coyote repeatedly plummeting into a chasm sends me to the floor, helpless with laughter. But time, memory and the way in which both elements change perception seem to be the themes of a number of this month’s concerts.

On March 3 the Guelph Chamber Choir presents “Remember … Places, people and songs you love.” With the concert’s repertoire focussed around folk songs, spirituals, Broadway show tunes and cabaret songs, audience members will doubtless find themselves recalling specific occasions tied by memory to some specific song.

Toronto’s Bell’Arte Singers have presented a whole series of linked concerts this year (for the complete series see bellartesingers.ca) that evoke this sense of introspection. Their latest March 3 concert, “Classical: Ways of Seeing,” features music by Bach, Barber, Mozart and Brahms, among others. Treating the music almost like visual works of art, this choir asks its audience to not only listen but to ponder the question of what constitutes beauty, balance and classicism.

Another concert evoking a bygone era is the Victoria Scholars’ “The Romantic Gentleman,” on March 4. Here, the audience is reminded not to lose sight of the things that may fall by the wayside in our charge towards modernity. Comprising works by Brahms, Elgar, Gounod, Rossini, Grieg and others, this concert conjures a time of frock coats and muttonchop whiskers, of codes of honour and high-minded behaviour. The title of this concert also raises a difficult, extra-musical question: what standard defines a “romantic gentleman” in the 21st century? Is our new “RG” the man who discreetly refrains from posting on Facebook or Twitter pictures of himself passed out beside a beer bong (merely texting them instead to his closest friends)? Standards have changed, of course. But perhaps attendance at this particular concert should be mandatory for men 25 and under.

One of English literature’s most poignant evocations of the pangs of memory and the challenges of time and age is Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The playwright’s last play, it contains some of his most powerful poetry, and with lines like “in the dark backward and absym of time,” is generally thought, in part, to be a meditation on the currents and sorrows of Shakespeare’s own life. Chorus Niagara (in pan-Canadian partnership with the Richard Eaton Singers, who work out of Edmonton, and the Vancouver Bach Choir) has commissioned Canadian composer Allan Bevan to create No Mortal Business. This new work takes as its premise the idea that The Tempest (and other earlier works of Shakespeare) were indeed windows into the playwright’s preoccupation with religion, politics, aging and art. Orpheus Choir and Chorus Niagara will combine to make up a 160-voice ensemble to present the work on March 4.

Two local choirs, on the other hand, embrace and celebrate the passage of time this month. The Toronto Classical Singers, directed by their founder, Jurgen Petrenko, celebrate their 20th anniversary. I have sung on several occasions with this rambunctious and friendly group of singers, and it is a pleasure to salute them at this time. On March 4 they perform Vivaldi’s Gloria and Schubert’s Mass in G.

Tafelmusik Chamber Choir celebrates its 30th anniversary with a series of concerts from March 27 to April 1. Full disclosure: I have also sung with this ensemble and have accompanied student vocalists and instrumentalists on lute and theorbo at the Tafelmusik Baroque Summer Institute. Setting these connections aside, I can state with confidence that TCC is one of the top choral ensembles in the city and possibly in all of Canada. This group has been part of the continuing story of the resurgence of pre-1750 music — a sprawling, international dialogue between scholars, performers and audiences that has revived and uncovered a multicultural wealth of previously forgotten composers and compositions.

The Tafelmusik Orchestra, of which the choir is an offshoot, has been a leader in this ongoing area of discovery. For these concerts, The TCC has commissioned a new piece by Canadian composer James Rolfe, and will also perform works by Purcell, Rameau, Handel, Poulenc and Saint-Saëns.

Anniversaries define the passage of time; so do annual events. Outside of the Jewish community, one of the lesser known holidays is Purim, a real children’s party centred around costumes, games and food. Purim commemorates the story of Queen Esther, one of the great mythic tales of Jewish pride and independence. The Toronto Jewish Folk Choir performs songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Russian and English at its March 1 “Purim Concert.”

Memory is what helps define tradition — what we remember of the past shapes our present and future. Canada is a young country filled with immigrants, and for many it is the histories and art forms of our ancestral countries that often define us. At the same time, Canadian composers are hard at work creating a repertoire that they hope will help define us anew. Choirs performing concerts that include Canadian works are the Vespera Choir, March 29, the Echo Women’s Choir, March 31, and the aptly named Canadian Singers, who perform in Markham on March 4.

Finally, the choral requiem form, often valedictory in nature, is well represented this month. Fauré’s Requiem, a particularly tender and introspective setting, is performed by two different choirs: Oriana Women’s Choir on March 3 and the Church of St. Nicholas Birchcliffe, March 30. Another requiem setting by a French composer, Maurice Duruflé, can be heard from the Voices Chamber Choir on March 31. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir performs Vaughan Williams’s Mass in G and Martin’s Mass for Double Choir on Good Friday, April 6. On the same evening the Metropolitan Festival Choir performs Bach’s Mass in B Minor, and the Georgian Bay Concert Choir performs Mozart’s Requiem in D Minor. Canadian composer Eleanor Daley’s excellent Requiem is presented by Mississauga Festival Choir on March 31.

(Venue change - Voices' 31 March concert is now being held at Church of St. Martin in-the-Fields.)

To sum up, this month’s concerts, built around memory and the passage of time, enjoin us to respect the past, so that we may better understand the present and prepare for the future. At least, I think they do. I’d better check my notes …

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at benjaminstein.ca.

The modern holiday that we understand as Christmas is a construct that arises from many different sources: a combination of pre-Christian winter solstice iconography; appropriated and re-interpreted prophetic Hebrew texts; various writers’ telling and retelling of the life and deeds of the mysterious, charismatic public speaker and teacher Joshua Ben Joseph (later more familiarly known as Jesus Christ); and the sung and spoken sacred texts of hundreds of millions of Christians around the world.

Complicating the “modern” Christmas still further is the North American figure of Santa Claus, a benevolent gift-giver very loosely based on the third century Greek bishop Nicholas of Myra. Mercurial, harsh and irascible, the historical Saint Nick would have been a poor front-man for the vendors desperate to lure us to the shopping malls. He’d have been more likely to smite busy shoppers than to invite their children to sit upon his knee, wish list in hand.

It is not hard to imagine both Joshua and Nicholas together in some extra-worldly sphere, watching our frantic salterello of cards, gifts, parties and food with bemusement and despair in varied measure.

In the midst of this singular historical stew, music holds a special place in Christmas celebration. For many the pleasures of hearing and singing seasonal songs and carols is a welcome antidote to Christmas’ confused blend of commercialism, celebration, spirituality and dogma. The marvels and portents that accompany the birth of Christ reflect our joy, fear and incomprehension when confronted with one of the two most primal aspects of life–its beginning. Christmas music at its best combines joy with contemplation, the earth-bound with the marvellous.

The performative nature of Christmas concerts makes them simultaneous celebrations of, and comments on, the phenomenon of Christmas. Below are some concerts of note for the coming season.

On December 10, the Tallis Choir recreates a Christmas Eve mass as it would have been heard in Quebec in 1725. The concert includes Charpentier’s Messe de Minuit and carols by baroque composers from Quebec and France.

Between December 13 and 30, Theatre Columbus reinterprets the Nativity story, in an outdoor theatre presentation at the historic Evergreen Brick Works. The audience is advised to dress warmly. Theatre Columbus is a creative workshop of a theatre company, and this version of the Nativity story clearly falls refreshingly into the irreverent/revisionist category. A different choir will provide musical accompaniment for every performance.

The Magnificat, or the Song of Mary, is a text taken from the Gospel of Luke. It is an attempt to see the events of the Nativity from Mary’s point of view. Women who have experienced giving birth in difficult circumstances might have their own opinions about how well it succeeds. In any case, it has been set by many composers, and on December 8, English visitors, the Tallis Scholars, one of the world’s eminent chamber choirs, will be performing several of these diverse settings. Toronto Choral Society also looks to Europe, if somewhat further east, performing “An Eastern European Christmas” on December 14. As well as including Eastern European carols, the concert provides an opportunity to hear a Franz Liszt setting of the mass text, the Missa Choralis.

Two great writers, Dylan Thomas and Charles Dickens, wrote very differently enchanting commentaries on the nature of Christmas. Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales is rooted in the real and physical, the tangible sensory understanding of a special event seen through the primal senses of a child: All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find …

Dickens’ A Christmas Carol combined his central theme of the struggle between greed and charity with a vastly entertaining ghost story that has made the character of Ebenezer Scrooge almost as significant as Santa in the complex modern North American Christmas iconography.

Two choirs combine music with each of these literary works:

Annex Singers combine A Child’s Christmas in Wales with works by Sweelinck, Joubert, Walton and Lauridsen on December 10. Then on December 18, Guelph’s Dublin Street United Church includes the work in “A Victorian Christmas,” with the Trillium Brass as guests. For those whose appetite for Welsh-ness is not satisfied by Dylan Thomas alone, the Toronto Welsh Male Voice Choir performs “A Welsh Christmas” on December 7 and 11.

Generosity is the theme of A Christmas Carol, which appears in two upcoming benefit performances. On December 4 the Nathaniel Dett Chorale teams up with the Choir of St. Timothy’s Anglican Church to sing in support of the Senior’s Health Centre of the North York General Hospital. On the same night, the Runnymede United Church Choir performs their Dickens-themed concert, which includes an appearance by tenor Ben Heppner, in support of the The Stop Community Food Centre.

Special church pageants and carol services are also an integral part of this season. The Church of the Holy Trinity’s nativity pageant, a popular draw, runs between December 9 and 24. Eglinton St. George United Church’s December 11 carol service includes Benjamin Britten’s iconic Ceremony of Carols. Peruse the choral listings for other carol concerts — you will find inventive musical choices and choral groups that you might have previously missed.

In the multicultural GTA, some choirs acknowledge and explore the mid-winter festivals that take place in non-Christian cultures, such as Hindu Diwali, the African-American Kwanzaa and Chanukah, the Hebrew festival of lights and gifts.

On December 14 the Toronto Jewish Folk Choir’s free “Chanukah Concert Live” includes songs in Yiddish, Hebrew, Ladino and English. North York’s Alexander Singers and Players combine Christmas and Chanukah music at “A Festive Concert” on December 10.

Hart House Singers and Echo Women’s Choir present interesting programmes of world music on December 4 and 11 respectively. These types of concerts are a welcome antidote to the seasonal saturation of familiar songs and carols that, while beautiful, lose some of their appeal after the 1000th hearing.

And of course, no December choral column would be complete without a mention of what has become Christmas’ most emblematic choral work, Handel’s Messiah.

So there, I’ve mentioned it. Let’s move on now. It’s always interesting to investigate the varied programmes that choirs messiah choose during the Christmas season. Drawing on the vast repertoire Messiah of music from different times and locations Messiah allows choirs MESSIAH to create unusual MESSIAH MESSIAH.

Oh, all right. Can’t you Handelians take a joke? It’s a great composition. I love it! So quit spamming my website and hacking my documents. I promise to venerate Handel’s Messiah until the end of my days. And tell that strange alto from Kitchener she can take down her aria recording, Ben is Despised, from YouTube.

Part of the fun of hearing such a well-known work is experiencing the varied interpretations that different soloists, conductors and choirs come up with. Increasingly, musicians are bringing a creative disrespect to this piece, toying with orchestration, interpretation and even improvisatory aspects of it, to keep it fresh and interesting. Yet a simple, straightforward performance, well executed, allows the brilliance of its construction to shine through as well. My recommendation is to attend a Messiah performance by a choir unfamiliar to you. So many groups are performing this work — take the opportunity to acquaint yourself with a choir that you have not yet seen perform, and expand your knowledge of the GTA choral scene. We have even appended a handy “Messiah QuickPicks” to this column (see next page) to guide you in your search.

Finally, one final concert reminds us that even Christmas’ familiar calendar date is not an agreed-upon fact. On January 8 the Vesnivka Choir and Toronto Ukrainian Male Chamber Choir present “A Ukrainian Christmas Concert.” Eastern European Christmas culture can be wonderfully rich and mystical, and is a link to Christianity’s oldest roots. Could it be that this concert — presented at a time at which the rest of us are glumly contemplating our credit card statements — is the only one here that would have made any kind of cultural sense to the historical Saint Nicholas?

Christmas can be a very difficult time for people, as they attempt to reconcile the Apollonian ideal of the holiday with life’s often disappointing realities. But as I hope I’ve made clear above, a monolithic Christmas tradition does not in fact exist, and never did. Accordingly, we are free to define this holiday in a way that makes sense to each of us. Relieved of the obligation to enact an ideal version of Christmas, one can instead pick and choose, discard and redefine — as history itself has done — which elements combine together to create your own understanding of the season.

LOOKING AHEAD TO JANUARY: After the December revels comes the new year’s hangover. The only solution, of course, is musical “hair of the dog” — i.e. more sybaritic choral excess. The January and February concerts mentioned below can feed this entirely healthy addiction.

Between January 18 and 22, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra performs Mozart’s d minor Requiem, his final, unfinished work before his untimely death.

Brahms then takes over on February 4. Two concerts to choose from are a concert by the Larkin Singers that includes Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer, and Kitchener’s Grand Philharmonic Choir performing Brahms’ Ein Deutsches Requiem and Arvo Pärt’s Credo and Cantus in Memoriam.

Finally, on February 2 and 3, Soundstreams presents the Amadeus Choir and Elmer Iseler Singers in an intriguing presentation of The Sealed Angel by Rodion Shchedrin. Shchedrin is a living piece of history, a Russian composer who lived through the Soviet era and who continues to work today. The staged performance includes the participation of ProArteDanza dance company.

He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at http://benjaminstein.ca/.

Let us take a moment to celebrate, or perhaps curse, the memory of misheard lyrics, the finding of which is great fun, and is one of the great time-wasting joys of the internet. Mishearing “breaking rocks in the hot sun” as “a grape skin rots in the hot sun” in the Clash’s I fought the Law’s is a good one. But the serene phrase from Psalm 23, “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,” heard as “Surely good Mrs Murphy shall follow me all the days of my life,” is my long-time personal favourite.

Iselers at the Distillery: The latter quote — the correct one, I mean — is from the King James Bible, a translation of various Christian and Hebrew scriptures, and was for centuries the central document through which these texts were disseminated in the English-speaking world. Truly beautiful though it is, it contains many inaccuracies and misreadings, particularly of Hebrew scripture, which have been corrected or re-translated by later scholars. But for those who grew up with the King James version, these reinterpretations often seem to lack richness and resonance. Never mind that any western translation of a several thousand year-old text from the Middle East is likely to miss the original point by a wide, almost unbridgeable inter-cultural gap; our fallible memories create orthodoxies that lead us to strongly resist the unfamiliar and new, especially when the old is so much more singable.

While one can challenge its accuracy, no one can deny the poetic majesty of the King James Bible, which has been a source of inspiration to many great composers. Various musical settings of King James-derived material can be enjoyed at a concert on 25 November by the Elmer Iseler Singers, titled “King James and Shakespeare.” (The birth of the King James Bible 400 years ago coincides with Shakespeare’s latter years.) The concert takes place in an unusual venue for the Iselers — the Young Centre for the Performing Arts in the Distillery District. Jazzmen Gene DiNovi and Dave Young guest and Soulpepper Theatre’s Albert Schulz narrates.

The Mendelssohn’s Brahms: Johannes Brahms was a composer with an acute sense of cultural memory. Conscious of his place in musical history, and highly respectful of his mentor Robert Schumann, he had a sense of responsibility towards understanding and furthering the musical traditions to which he was heir.

His famous feud with Wagner — or rather, the feud between fans and advocates of the two composers — centred around the question of memory. Wagner’s aesthetic demanded a sweeping away of the old, including old musical forms. Brahms felt that older forms could be imbued with new ideas.

Nowadays it is possible to hear elements of both innovation and musical tradition in Brahms. The Toronto Mendelssohn Choir presents an all-Brahms programme on November 9. The Alto Rhapsody and Deutsches Requiem are among Brahms’ greatest choral works, but the evening is notable for two lesser known works as well, Nänie and the Gesang der Parzen (Song of the Fates). Brahms’ choral works are imbued with his knowledge of baroque contrapuntal part-writing, and are consistently innovative in terms of timbres and techniques. They are notably more interesting than Wagner’s choral writing. Oops, was that my outside voice?

Incidentally, the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir is programming some intriguing choral read-throughs and conducting workshops in the weeks and months ahead. These are excellent resources for choral singers and conductors, and are well worth checking out. Go to the TMC’s website and look under “education and outreach.”

25th solstice: A choir’s own past can also be the occasion for celebration. On December 3, Jenny Crober’s East York Choir celebrates its 25th year of existence with “Winter Solstice,” a concert that includes a premiere of a work by veteran Canadian composer Stephen Hatfield. The EYC has always been open to folk and popular elements in choral music, and has consistently programmed works both substantive and entertaining.

And speaking of the solstice, the Christmas choral celebration, fast upon us, can be a particularly contentious arena. Often one hears the seasonal plea, in part a reaction to the commercialization of the holiday, to “keep Christ in Christmas.” And yet many of the most familiar tropes of Christmas — holly, trees, gifts, the midwinter date of the celebration — are borrowed and appropriated from pre-Christian pantheistic worship, popularly known as paganism.

One might reasonably argue that many of the apparently non-religious aspects of Christmas that are often deplored — the saturnalia of gift-giving, decoration, parties and indulgence in food and drink — have actually returned Christmas to its pre-Christian roots, a mid-winter solstice celebration of companionship and warmth in the midst of cold and darkness. Muse on this when next you hear the great carol, The Holly and the Ivy, redolent with pagan imagery.

The above is only one of many great carols, and one of the delights of this time of year is the chance to indulge in many concerts and hear the many and varied approaches to carols, songs and extended Christmas-themed works. I am told that a measure of eggnog can add to this delight, though this column takes no responsibility for the health or safety of those who over-indulge in either carols or festive drinks.

Finally, some upcoming seasonal concerts of note

The Kyiv Chamber Choir, on tour of Canada from the Ukraine, sings in Waterloo, St. Catherines and Toronto between November 25 and 27.

The Mohawk College Community Choir includes Saint-Saëns’ Christmas Oratorio in a concert on December 3.

On the same night, Cantores Celestes performs Canadian choral icon Derek Holman’s Sir Christemas in a concert that benefits, in part, the Assaulted Women’s Helpline.

In Guelph on November 26, the Guelph Chamber Choir performs “Voices of Light: An Advent Festival of Music and Poetry,” including English-born Canadian Paul Halley’s Voices of Light and works by American choral composers Daniel Pinkham and Eric Whitacre.

I am always advocating for Benjamin Britten’s St. Nicholas to evolve into a seasonal favourite on par with Messiah, Christmas Oratorio, etc. The Pax Christi Chorale performs this wonderful work on December 3 and 4.

Also on December 3, the Toronto Choral Society performs in a Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra concert with the intriguing title of “Howard Cable’s Cowboy Christmas.” Composer Cable, a genuine Canadian institution, hosts and conducts.

For those who are not quite ready to embrace the winter choral season in all its frosty exuberance, Isabel Bernaus’ Jubilate Singers performs “Music of the Mediterranean” on November 26. A concert that focuses on music from warmer climes might be just the thing to feed the spirit as the cold weather descends and the autumn recedes into memory?

Ben Stein is a Toronto tenor and theorbist. He can be contacted at choralscene@thewholenote.com. Visit his website at http://benjaminstein.ca.