EUGENE, Ore — I love Eric Whitacre’s music. I imagine that many fans of choral music agree with me. His work is lyrical and harmonious, poetic and optimistic. It’s approachable. The choral conductor and composer has won a Grammy. He’s sought after. He and his work are known all over the world, partly for his Covid-era virtual choir, in which about 100,000 people from 145 countries joined in song. He was an artist-in-residence at the three-week Oregon Bach Festival that ended July 14.
His music, however, is not tragic, if the subject of his 12-movement The Sacred Veil, is. Performed July 12 at the Oregon Bach Festival in the acoustically attuned jewel-box 520-seat Beall Concert Hall on the University of Oregon campus, the music isn’t tragic, or particularly dark. Intimate – it was. Gorgeous, yes. Memorable, yes. Whitacre’s music is luminous; it lights up the world, it doesn’t darken it or tear it apart. Considering the brutal subject matter – the loss of a beloved 35-year-old mate – the music is too smooth and too beautifully harmonious to invoke or to fully express tragedy.
The piece was commissioned and performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale in 2019. Five years later, in Eugene, the multi-author poem put to Whitacre’s music sung by the well-honed and impeccably blended Oregon Bach Festival Chorus, tells a story about loss. Many of the 500 or so in the audience likely have suffered the experience of losing a partner to cancer, the piece’s heart-wrenching theme. Hard to say how many tears were shed or catharses reached. Certainly awe and appreciation spread throughout the hall.
The text was written by Whitacre’s best friend and frequent collaborator Charles Anthony Silvestri, by Silvestri’s late wife Julia Lawrence Silvestri, and by Whitacre. There were two instrumental interludes by violoncellist Marilyn de Oliveira and collaborative pianist Andrew Campbell. Their accompanying instrumentation was spare and well-paced, never overwhelming the singing. The choral work by the 62-strong chorus was as clear as layers of bells with basses and tenors singing behind alto and sopranos. The piece was 58 minutes long, and with Whitacre’s pre-performance explanation and a virtual choir encore, the program lasted almost 90 minutes during the 90-degree Eugene evening.
The story
Silvestri’s late wife Julia died of cancer at 35 years old, and Silvestri was left to raise his two small children. The couple was talented, highly educated in similar ancient history fields, and madly in love. They struggled to conceive; they eventually did, and had two kids who were very young when Julia died.
Whitacre convinced Silvestri to work out his grief by writing about it. Whitacre, 54, thought the story could be a modern-day “hero’s journey,” he said before the performance, where the text was projected on the screen above the stage. Silvestri “kept his North Star,” Whitacre said in his introductory remarks. He continued to look ahead and away from death, yet Silvestri was humbled and wounded. In some ways, the piece was an exercise in sorting out and coming to terms with profound loss. With such strong emotions in gear, Whitacre encouraged Silvestri to “just make something,” and write out his feelings — one way of settling grief into manageable pieces and places.
How The Sacred Veil unfolds
“Sacred veil”: what does that mean? Beverly Taflinger writes in the program notes, “In the manner of a Greek chorus, the first movement introduces the metaphysical concept of a `ribbon of energy’ between the impermanent physical world and the ineffable spiritual world. This ubiquitous veil becomes permeable as loved ones cross over it via birth and death, allowing `love to slip’ through and touch those on either side.”
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The work’s 12 movements take the audience on a journey of grief and loss through the Silvestri courtship, the nasty medical diagnosis and loss of hair (told humorously and bravely by Julia as her children touch her head), the reflections on illness and projections of survival, the love between mother and children, the husband’s crippling heartbreak. The movements varied in length and mood; Whitacre knows how to keep things interesting. “Home” — “You feel like home,” the one-line third movement -– blossomed into several minutes of singing and quiet piano chords. The music dictated, not the text.
The sixth movement, “I’m Afraid,” goes through the horrible dry medical report with “metastasis” echoing several times, as did “recurrent, recurrent, recurrent,” emphasizing the relentless nature of ovarian cancer. This part ends with Silvestri’s lament, “I’m afraid,” one of the few discordant moments.
The 11th movement, “You Rise, I Fall” was the most moving and dramatic, with voices climbing and descending, as Silvestri lets go and crumbles into his unknown future while Julia leaves the earthly world. “Your struggle ends as mine begins,” Silvestri writes. “You rise; I fall.” Whitacre’s use of gently contrasting dynamics is extraordinary.
The piece ends with Whitacre’s rhyming quatrain poem, “Child of Wonder,” slightly reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s lyricism and otherworldly tone.
Child of sorrow
Child of rain
There is no tomorrow
There is no more pain.
Turn your silvered sail
Toward the light
Child of mourning
Child of night.
The audience went wild. The applause and whoop-whooping continued for minutes. The evening was full of radiant choral music, even if The Sacred Veil’s score didn’t reach the realm of tragedy, though certainly, that didn’t overshadow the concert’s incandescent beauty.
