Pacific Chorale: Daughter of Light

April 17th, 2011

This concert featured the ‘Plorate filii Israel’ chorus from Giacomo Carissimi’s Jephte (1648), the choral version of David’s Lang’s The Little Match Girl Passion (2007), and the 1893 version of Gabriel Faure’s Requiem in D minor, Op. 48.

I admit that I had high hopes for this program, and those hopes were not satisfied by the end. Soprano Zanaida Robles was listed on the headline of the program, so I anticipated that she would play a greater role than what she actually did. First, I expected the Jephte excerpt to include more than just the final chorus; it is preceded by a very lovely soprano solo, so I initially assumed the Pacific Chorale would include that with Robles (I was mistaken). She did not have a solo in the Lang piece, either, so it was a little odd for her to return to the stage for an “encore” before the intermission, performing a very classically-styled rendition of the spiritual Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child. (I love this spiritual, and enjoyed a very different performance of it by a former Redlands student much more than I did Robles’ classical soprano version.)

I didn’t mind this inserted performance once. I questioned the reasoning behind the programming, however, when Robles returned after her one-movement solo in the Faure Requiem to sing the same song again. Double encore of the same piece? I’ve never experienced that, and it gave me a very weird sense of déjà vu.

That strangeness aside, I wasn’t as pleased with the Lang passion as I thought I would be. The John Alexander Singers, a 24-voice professional chamber choir, performed a “staged” version of The Little Match Girl Passion. I appreciated their dedication to memorizing the entire work, but the staging left much to be desired. The movements were somewhat expressive but mostly just exaggerated gestures, and it was distracting when the performers were not completely synchronized.

Lang’s transformation of The Little Match Girl story into a Passion was interesting, and I appreciated the juxtaposition of texts. He had effective musical ideas too, such as the inclusion of several percussion instruments (bass drum, handbells, brake drum, glockenspiel, crotales, and sleighbells), a text-setting style that repeated syllables over and over for a “shivering” effect in several sections (like “When it is time for me to go”), and a very lovely canon that blurred between dissonance and consonance (“Have mercy, my God”). The latter was my favorite moment of the entire piece. My favorite use of the percussion was an interjection of solo brake drum that was amplified to project the unusual scraping/rubbing effect on its surface. The “shivering” vocal technique was interesting and evocative at first, but I would have preferred it to happen only at the beginning of phrases rather than through the entirety of the phrases. I liked the overall material of the work as well, but ultimately the repetition of different sections throughout the piece (to new text) was too minimal and redundant for my personal taste. I would have appreciated a greater depth of variety and development.