Madison’s Festival Choir performed an outstanding concert of weather-related works this weekend, with the help of WKOW television meteorologist Bob Lindmeier.
The Festival Choir is a superb, masterful and inventive ensemble that deserves much more recognition. In this age of “Glee,” you’d think there’d be a lot more interest. There certainly should be.
Saturday’s themed concert, “How’s the Weather,” featured a sometimes wild collection of choral works designed to show off the group’s flexibility, range and sense of humor; Lindmeier linked the pieces with a pun-filled “forecast,” complete with weather map.
Over the years, most of us have only heard the Festival Choir briefly, offstage at the end of the first act of Madison Ballet’s “Nutcracker” – and not even then, if it’s a bad budget year. That’s too bad.
I suspect that musical snobbery is the reason. “Serious” music lovers resist what I’m going to call “wind-pushers.” That includes the closest cousins of choirs: wind bands and pipe organs (also steam calliopes, but there’s no control of dynamics there). That is, they all push air. That’s all any sound is, but these wind-pushing musicalities are close neighbors, in that they can’t depend on contrasting texture -- otherwise offered, for example, by strings.
When well done, the necessary similarity of timbre creates limitations that, to my ear at least, make for the highest levels of musicality; phrasing and duration become critical, and compositional voicing – who does what, when – creates competing blocks of sound that surface and subside in layered windows, offering a whole higher level of more delicate contrast.
Composer Edward Elgar was a master of this, and the choir showed that in “The Snow” and “The Shower.” Tchaikovsky’s “The Golden Cloudlet” was similarly striking, and affecting: precise and powerful. Handel is always tough sledding, but a selection from “Israel in Egypt” celebrated his trademark counterpoint in fine fashion.
The stand-out work was Scott Gendel’s “There Came a Wind like a Bugle,” based on Emily Dickinson’s poem. It’s an odd piece with odder seven-measure phrasing and fast-changing minor keys. Billed as a world premiere, I wish the program or the choir’s website had more information on the composer and this haunting, compelling work.
The audience adored show tunes adapted to choral settings, including “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” and a snappy, whispery “Too Darn Hot.” While “Soon It’s Gonna Rain” worked very well, I have aesthetic problems with translating individual dramatic parts to full choir.
But that bothered no one else, and the evening’s close, “Blue Skies,” was greeted with an instant standing ovation.
This was artistic director Bruce Gladstone’s final concert with the choir. He’s to be congratulated, as is American Family Insurance, which helped sponsor the evening.
The concert, at the First United Methodist Church, was attended by around 150. For more information on the Festival Choir, visit www.festivalchoir.org.
You couldn't be more on the money!!!
Posted by: nulled | 11/21/2011 at 01:34 AM