The Essence of Beethoven

Willamette Master Chorus wraps up their 40^th-Anniversary season with a concert that is a balance of the past and the present and the harmony found in placing them side by side. And it’s all Beethoven – even the piece composed by Jake Runestad.

A pairing of the Fantasia for piano, chorus and orchestra, Op. 80, with the “Ode to Joy” Finale of Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125 (1824) would be interesting enough. The Fantasia premiered as the final piece in an 1808 4-plus-hour “go fund LVB” benefit in which Beethoven himself performed on the piano. It was considered a bit rough and not at all ready. Today, it’s a winner according to Willamette University Artist in Residence Jean-David Coen. 

The Fantasia “is clearly a sketch of the Ninth Symphony ‘ode to joy’,” wrote Coen in recent email to OAW. “There are thematic similarities listeners will probably identify rather quickly.” Coen went on to describe what he calls Beethoven’s obsessive “working out” process of thematic transformation:

“In the Fantasy, it is the long opening piano cadenza which prepares us for the main musical theme. Beethoven, here as in the 9th, doesn’t introduce his main theme without an elaborate introduction. In the 9th he ingeniously brings back snippets from each of the 3 prior movements, before stalling even further with the vocal recitative which invites us to sing of things more joyous – ‘oh, friends no more of these sounds!’ [The Fantasy], a ‘warm-up’ for what was to come, is a unique work. Not a piano concerto, not a symphony, not purely a choral piece.” 

Listen here to one special performance as Martha Argerich performs the Fantasia with Seiji Ozawa on the occasion of the great conductor’s 81st birthday.

What is to come next in the WMC program is a portrait of a philosophical and anguished Ludwig van Beethoven brought to life when orchestra, chorus and piano perform Runestad’s A Silence Haunts Me. 

Runestad collaborated with poet Todd Boss to create the poignant work whose loosely adapted text is drawn from an unposted letter Beethoven wrote to his brothers. The letter, now known as the “Heiligenstadt Testament” was written in 1802 when Beethoven was 32. The composer would complete the bulk of his compositions in his 24 more years as his hearing loss continued, living his final twelve years, until age 56, in complete silence. 

Coen will join the audience to hear his student of nine years, Trinity Goff, perform the demanding piano role in A Silence Haunts Me. Goff, who graduated from Willamette University this past December and will continue her studies next year at Cleveland Institute of Music, spoke in recent phone conversation with OAW about performing the Runestad.

“A lot of times these works can be contrived,” Goff said. “This work does not have that feel.” In practicing the piece before the first rehearsal she began to hear Beethoven; and you will, too. There are the obvious references – suggestions of the “Moonlight Sonata” and the “Ode to Joy” melody–but there are more subtle references throughout, creating a demanding piano role that collaborates with the choir to tell Beethoven’s story. Goff toured the work with Willamette University Chamber choir and now performs in its full orchestral version. She is looking forward to the concert. “There is brilliance in the chronology of the repertoire, but such power in each piece separately.” Thank you, Trinity, for the perfect description of this well-composed program. Oh, cool trivia alert: on stage with Goff in the choral forces will be her aunt, two cousins and her brother. 

Willamette Master Chorus returns to its founding years and shares the stage and podium with Willamette University’s Chamber Choir and the University Orchestra, directed by Anna Song and Qinqing Qian, respectively.

You’ll hear a great line up of soloists for the Fantasia and the B9 Finale: Jocelyn Thomas, soprano; Hannah Penn, mezzo; Les Green, tenor; Zachary Lennox, baritone; and WMC choristers Laura Wagstaff and Bryce Tomlin. 

Beethoven, on piano, orchestra and voice, is center stage in Willamette Master Chorus’s “Choral Fantasia” concert on Saturday and Sunday, April 26 and 27, both at 3 pm in WU’s Hudson Hall. Tickets and information are here.

Footnote: For those of you who would appreciate a further concert amuse bouche, enjoy this 12-minute video dissecting common elements in the two Beethoven works: 

Time for reflection

“A concert savoring the expansiveness of the human experience – the good and the bad” (PGMC website) – is offered on April 19 by Cascade, the small ensemble of Portland Gay Men’s Chorus conducted by PGMC Associate Artistic Director Garrett Bond. 

If you had the opportunity “To Slow Down the Time” would you take it? Don’t rush your answer.

Perhaps the music will help you decide when you attend Cascade’s contemplative spring concert on Saturday, April 19, 8 pm at the Alberta Abbey. Tickets and information are here.

Beaverton Students Unite in Singing

Beaverton School District music educator Chris Rust thinks the upcoming BSD High School Collaborative Choral Concert on April 16 might be the first in three decades – but for sure it’s a first since he began directing the Sunset High School choirs 19 years ago. That’s one of the reasons he and his student musicians are excited about meeting and hearing their sibling choirs from Aloha HS, Mountainside HS, Southridge HS, and Westview HS (Beaverton HS is on tour and could not participate). Each choir will present two pieces on their own. But Rust’s students are especially psyched about all five choirs combining to sing the premier of their choir teacher’s new work Requiem: In Remembrance of Former Students. “It’s a celebration of life; not just students but everybody,” said Sunset student singer Eli Hoffman.

OAW attended a rehearsal with Sunset singers who were not only rehearsing for the High School Collaboration but also for an upcoming competitive festival. Rust’s Requiem is composed for strings and chorus, and while some texts reference the original Latin – “requiem aeternam,” “lux aeterna” – there are no overtly religious references. Colloquial text is by Rust. It is, as Eli said, a celebration and, from segments heard in this rehearsal, it is an accessible and meaningful new work. Bravo.

The meaning of the concert collaboration itself? Choir member Sharanya Sannidhi says it’s about “sharing what we have learned”; her choir classmate Jocelyn James agreed that this event is not about competing, “it’s about getting together.” And the place where they are getting together to sing for families, friends and Beaverton principals, is the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. Only a couple of hands went up when asked who had been to Beaverton’s wonderful new performance center. Cool. These students – and you – are in for a treat. (Special thanks to senior Jadah for the walk and talk through the halls.)

Be part of the collaboration and celebration of life when five Beaverton High Schools present their “High School Collaborative Choral Concert” on Wednesday, April 16, 7:30 pm at the Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. Tickets and information are here.

Repeat Requiem at the Reser

Portland Choir and Orchestra invites you to join them in Beaverton for their matinee and evening performances of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem on Saturday, April 26. 

Thirty one-year-old Johannes Brahms eschewed the Latin mass in favor of personalized text taken from the Lutheran Bible. The work presents no specific religious doctrine and serves to console the living in their time of grief. It is proposed that two significant deaths – of his mentor Robert Schumann and his mother – prompted Brahms to compose this Requiem, a singular work in his oeuvre. PCO will present the beloved work in the original German with English subtitles.

Hear baritone Stacey Murdock, well known to our Portland area audiences for his work on the opera stage, in Portland “Opera on the Go” school presentations and oratorio and concert appearances around the state and nationwide. Soprano Madison Barton-Holloway is currently completing her master’s degree at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Artistic Director David M. Thomas and Orchestra Conductor Edward Higgins will conduct. This is Higgins’s final concert after eleven years with PCO. 

Join Portland Choir and Orchestra in Beaverton concerts of Brahms’s Requiem on Saturday, April 26, at 2 pm and 7 pm, Patricia Reser Center for the Arts. Tickets and information are here.

Musical Soul in Bend

Choral lovers living in Bend, visiting Bend, have family and friends in Bend: Central Oregon Mastersingers wraps up their season on April 27 with music that “crosses time and space” (CCM website) to get down in your soul!

Music Down in My Soul by Moses Hogan will be performed as will Bob Dylan’s Times They are a-Changin’. Familiar works. But have you heard Pärt Uusberg’s meditative Muusika? It will reach for another part of your soul as will a 2024 work by Alex Berko, Sacred Places. Commissioned and premiered by Conspirare, the work names our environment as a sacristy. Listen here to the middle section of this 22-ish minute work for choir, numerous soloists, piano, violin and cello. 

A familiar structure helps make this challenging work accessible to listeners. And a motif repeated throughout draws the ear. The choir is excited to be zooming with the Chicago-based composer next week. 

Another contemporary work, Let Me Believe by Texan Ayrian Norman, provides a positive message to complete the Central Oregon Mastersingers 19^th season. 

Central Oregon Mastersingers brings beautiful music to their community with “Music Down In My Soul” on Sunday, April 27, 7 pm at Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Central Oregon. Tickets and information here.

Mirrored Voices

Terrific concert title: “Mirrored Voices.” Choral Arts Ensemble wants you to know just what to expect from works by late Renaissance composer Luca Marenzio to twentieth century Swiss master Frank Martin and lots in between. Double choir – and triple and quadruple choir – music in St. Philip Neri Church, Portland’s favorite surround-sound acoustic? Bliss!

In addition to Marenzio’s Jubilate Deo (a triple) is the 16-voice Crucifiux by Antonio Caldara, a Baroque master of counterpoint who flourished in Italy and Vienna. But after this concert, the Buccinate in Neomenia Tuba by Giovanni Croce might be on your list of favorite Venetian Renaissance-era pieces. Listen to it here:

Yes, choral cognoscenti out there – we know you already guessed that Giovanni Gabrieli’s Gloria a 12 would be performed and you probably hope to hear J. S. Bach’s first motet, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (BWV 225). You will. But it is Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir that reigns in this performance.

Program notes, as always written with so much care by CAE singer Susan Wladaver-Morgan, describe what you will hear in Martin’s Mass.

“Martin’s Mass sounds like no other. It never needed to, because Martin originally intended no one but God to hear it. This left him free to explore his own faith experience and draw on whatever styles allowed him to express it. Different parts sound as dreamy as Debussy or as vigorous as Bach, especially in the Gloria and the Credo, complete with fugues; in places, it recalls the twelve-tone serialism of Schoenberg. Perhaps most striking is the Agnus Dei, which he composed two years after the other movements. Beneath the melody, shifting harmonies subtly move through the second choir’s meditative chanting, suggesting gradual insights growing within everyday life. By the last repetition, the first choir finally abandons unison, and rich harmonies pervade both choirs in a prayer for peace.”

Wladaver-Morgan’s complete program notes, with more about how Martin’s Mass came to life after being tucked away for decades, are already posted on CAE’s website here. 

Choral Arts Ensemble performs in the ideal Portland venue for “Mirrored Voices”, St. Philip Neri, on Saturday, April 26, 7:30 and on Sunday, April 27, 3, after which you are invited to a reception and silent auction fundraiser. Tickets, pay what you can option and information here.

Worship with music 

Cantores in Ecclesia’s annual concert for Palm Sunday is April 13. Hear stirring music for the Lenten season including one of the most ambitious – and beautiful – pieces on the program, Poulenc’s Quatre motets pour un temps de penitence (Four motets for the season of Lent). Some of you out there just gave a big sigh recalling particularly the second motet “Venea mea electa.” Memories of singing it; memories of hearing it. Take a moment with it here:

Works also chosen for the season are Pablo Casals’ O Vos Omnes, Robert White’s Lamentations of Jeremiah a 5 and Carlo Gesualdo’s Tenebrae Responsoria. White, who died in his thirties, was a highly regarded contemporary of William Byrd (yes, I know you get excited; we’ll talk about this summer’s Byrd Festival real soon); his two settings of Lamentations, though scarcely performed, are jewels in the Renaissance repertoire. 

Cantores in Ecclesia presents “O Vos Omnes”, a concert for Palm Sunday on April 13, 7:30 at Holy Rosary Catholic Church. BTW, there will be music by William Byrd. Tickets and information are here.

Cantico Singers invites you to share music in commemoration of Good Friday on April 18. Music will be interspersed with scriptural readings. Join them for “And God So Loved The World” at 7 pm at St. James Episcopal Church, Tigard. All are welcome for free.

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The sting of the Virgin Mary’s pain as she stands at the Cross is portrayed from the first tones of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi’s 1736 Stabat Mater. On April 12 and 13 hear Portland Baroque Orchestra lean into “crucifixus” suspensions followed by two treble-voice solo entrances which begin with these words:

At the Cross her station keeping,
Stood the mournful mother weeping,

Some of you choral folks out there are thinking “I remember singing this work in a choir.” And you may well have because Pergolesi’s stirring twelve-movement work has been transcribed for choir several times. Perhaps if the brilliant composer had lived past age 26 he would have written his own full choral version. But with our PBO you get a chance to hear the original voicing with soprano and alto vocal roles sung by countertenor Tai Oney and soprano Anna Dennis. 

On the first half of this all Baroque concert, Artistic Director Julian Perkins conducts Scarlatti and Bach and warms things up with “Summer” as PBO concludes their year-long celebration of the 300^th anniversary of Le Quattro Stagioni.

Portland Baroque Orchestra concludes their season on Saturday, April 12, 7 pm at Sanctuary Hall at First Congregational Church and Sunday, April 13, 3 pm at Kaul Auditorium. Tickets are here. 

Yelling Choir

“Yelling” and “Choir.” Hmmm? But “despite the name,” said founding director Maxx Katz in a recent email to OAW, “Yelling Choir is much more and less than yelling. Yelling Choir creates unconventional, playful performances that use elements of music, theater, and dance to look at how we create supportive relationships.” Katz has a background as a composer and musician in jazz, new music, contemporary classical, noise, and heavy metal, and is currently working on an M.A. degree in Counseling to be a therapist. “It definitely relates,” Katz said, referring to the choir drawing “on the power of collective vocalizing to explore how to create a community that can sustain mutual support across difference.”

“Our vocal approach includes but is not limited to yelling; when we do yell, we use supportive techniques and work with a specialist. Our sonic vocabulary includes sibilances, footsteps, silences, humming, yelling, and even some singing.” All of these can be heard in a video of Yelling Choir performing last summer at the Oregon Center for Contemporary Art. 

“These performances,” wrote Katz, “demand a socially aware aesthetic of listening and seeing, that includes social relationship as a moving element of the internal composition of the piece.” 

Begin your relationship with Yelling Choir when they perform “What Will Contain Us” (with post-concert vocal workshop) on Saturday, April 19 at 5 pm at Portland Art Museums’ PAM Cut’s Tomorrow Theater.” Tickets are here.

Eugene Vocal Arts and Orchestra

In their 50-year history, the Eugene Concert Choir has contributed to the choral repertoire through commissions and premieres. One important commission close to home–and to the hearts of people living with Alzheimer’s Disease–was Shadow and Light composed by Oregon composer Joan Syzmko. Experience this important and heartfelt work again on April 12 and 13.  (Read ArtsWatch’s 2019 feature about the composition’s creation.)

In a recent email to OAW, Szymko reflected on the 2016 premiere: “Commissioning Artistic Director Diane Retallack has often shared about responses she received from audience members at the premiere: ‘How did you know how to tell my story?’ And so I’m confident that Shadow and Light speaks fully to the ache at the heart of Alzheimer’s. It also tells a beautiful, universal story of human resilience and of the rewards of a compassionate heart.” Contributing to the telling of the story in these concerts will be soprano Arwen Myers; mezzo Agnes Vojtko; tenor Brendan Tuohy; and speaker Lexy Wellman.

On both days ticket holders are invited to attend a special pre-concert screening of the award winning documentary about the creation of the work, The Story of Shadow and Light. AO Films followed Szymko and Retallack as they collaborated on the three part, sixteen-movement choral/orchestral work. The film, directed by Ryan Welch and edited by Ryan Rossman, won Best Documentary at the 2017 Oregon Independent Film Festival.

“There is an additional aspect of Alzheimer’s,” said Szymko, “that is not directly addressed in the score but is covered in the documentary and that is the turning away of friends and relations of those affected by the disease, because of the personal discomfort they feel with the profound changes that are manifestations of dementia. The disappearance of the support of social circles, the abandonment of friendships is yet another painful loss central to Alzheimer’s journey.” 

Watch The Making of Shadow and Light at AO films here.

OAW asked Szymko about other performances of the work since its premiere. “There were successful performances in Nashville, and here in Portland by ORS (Oregon Repertory Singers). Winnipeg Symphony presented an outreach performance in Manitoba last year.” And The Chapel Hill Chorus in North Carolina will perform the work next month. The pandemic interrupted plans for a European premiere in Edinburgh in 2020 and now funding is not available to program it again. “A 30-piece orchestra is a stretch financially for a community chorus to present an ‘unknown’ work,” admitted Szymko. Which is why she plans to return to the work this summer to create a “reduced forces compliment. This work and this Alzheimer’s story deserves more performances.” Yes.

Eugene Concert Choir, on their excellent website, has posted a video of their performers describing their experience with the work. Watch it here:

Hear it, experience it, performed by its “home” choir, Eugene Vocal Arts, on Saturday, April 12, 7 pm (5:30 film) and Sunday, April 13, 2:30 pm (1 pm film), at Soreng Theater, Hult Center in Eugene. Tickets are here.

Higher Ed Sings

Lewis and Clark College choirs and orchestra perform separately and together on Sunday, April 27. Combined forces present “Part 1” of Felix Mendelsohn’s Elijah, (up through where the “fire descends” in the chorus), and Ralph Vaughn Williams Dona Nobis Pacem. 

The college musicians invite you to join them for “Light Through Darkness” in the Agnes Flanagan Chapel on the Lewis and Clark Campus Sunday, April 27 at 4 pm. Tickets for the live performance and information about the live stream option are here.

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Pacific University choirs and their choral director Katy Green invite you to a concert on April 18. “Hear the River Calling” presents music to “support the journey forward toward making our individual lives, and the lives of others, improved” (Pacific website). 

Join the choirs on Friday, April 18, 7:30 at Taylor Meade Performance Center. Tickets are right here.

Important Date Coming Soon

No, not tax day. It’s Barbershop Quartet Day. Yes, Friday April 11 is the 86th birthday of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing. Bet you didn’t know that. To celebrate, random barbershop quartets are going to pop up in Portland on that celebratory day. You might head out of your favorite coffee house with your freshly poured brew and run right into this:

That group won the 2024 International Barbershop Quartet Contest. Oh, more cool trivia, the baritone and tenor (far left and right) are father and son. 

Drew Osterhout, Director of Pride of Portland, bets there are lots of things you wonder about barbershop music. For example, do lots of folks in our region sing barbershop? Yes! There are six active barbershop groups (which means “Sweet Adelines”, too) in the Portland/Vancouver metro:

• PDX Voices All-Voices Chorus
• Bridgetown Singers
• All-Voices Quartet Collective
• Pride of Portland SSAA Chorus
• Vocal Summit TTBB Chorus
• Northwest Harmony SSAA Chorus
• Columbia River SSAA Chorus

Do you know what a barbershop tag is? Did you know that lots of great barbershop music comes from Sweden? And did you know that the quartet in which Osterhout sings, Argonauts, is available for school visits? Osterhout has prepared this information page where you can learn more about this challenging, entertaining, central-nervous-system-zinging choral form. 

Read more about the history of National Barbershop Quartet Day here. And if you miss one of the quartet pop-ups on April 11, just groove on this:

The Choral Road Ahead

A quick look at Tom Hard’s PDX Choral Calendar will advise you of the choral/vocal tsunami forecast for the first weekend in May. Be ready to let the choral current carry you to eight concerts in Portland, one in Salem and one in Eugene. Oh, but there’s more. 

If it’s a whirlpool of School Music you desire, take in the Oregon State Chamber Ensemble Contest being held at Mount Hood Community College on May 2 and the Oregon State Solo Contest being held at Portland State University on May 3. Head-scratching weekend, eh? Watch for our next choral preview to learn about the concerts on that weekend, and all of May.