Rath of the Times

Bob Lindmeier helps guide sunny choral concert

 

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.

Madison handbells concert is outrageously fascinating

 
I confess to liking all that is novel in music. I like circus songs, Spike Jones, calliopes, zithers, the Clicquot Club Eskimos and ocarinas. But nothing ever, ever prepared me for Dave Brubek’s “Take Five” as performed by the Madison Area Concert Handbells.

Outrageous? And fascinating? And beautiful? You bet.

The handbells concert, which will be repeated this weekend, is 2/3 music and 1/3 performance art. Bells are rung, of course, but also waved, cupped, shaken and warbled. You have to see it – and hear it – to believe it.

It begins with long, narrow tiers of tables laid out as if for a bell banquet. There are little bells, big bells the size of peach baskets, mallets and more. Lots of patriotic songs are featured; the concert’s theme is “Americana Celebration!” It all really starts to cook, though, with “Good Vibrations” and Leroy Anderson’s “Plink, Plank, Plunk!”

The Madison Area Concert Handbells is a 14-year old ensemble. They have six octaves of bells, allowing for a rich depth of sound. The group’s 16 members also frequently change the texture of the sound, or timbre. Sometimes the bells sound like a marimba, and often like the biggest damn celeste you ever heard.

Kids will love it because it's all so unusual. Serious music lovers will enjoy it for the voicing and use of overtone series. The chord progressions thoughout make fascinating use of tonal decay – the dying down of a bell’s last sound played against the next new sound. In wind instruments, this is sometimes created as an effect, and is called a “bell tone.” Here, of course, it comes naturally.

The bells are tuned so perfectly that at times it gets a bit twee, or even electronic. Conductor Mark E. Bloedow makes sure that there’s plenty of accompaniment to contrast against, including pipe organ, piano, drums and a fine violin solo performed by guest artist Mishan Han.

This concert is a highly recommended as a look into a corner of the musical world that is too seldom visited.

The Madison Area Concert Handbells will repeat their “American Celebration” concert at 7 p.m. Saturday, May 7, at Asbury Methodist Church, 6101 University Ave. For information, visit www.madisonhandbells.org.

Haydn’s greatest “Creation” thrills

Joseph Haydn’s self-proclaimed masterpiece, The Creation, met with an instant and enthusiastic standing ovation in Madison on Saturday evening.

Around 440 attended the performance by the Wisconsin Chamber Choir and Stoughton Chamber Singers at the Madison Masonic Center.

The Creation is properly termed an oratorio, but in many ways it resembles an opera staged concert-style, complete with characters Adam, Eve and three angels. As we head into the Easter season it would be a fine salute to this year’s 400^th anniversary of the King James Bible, from which the text is drawn (along with Milton’s Paradise Lost). Or it would be, except the English libretto was translated into German for Haydn, and then translated back into English several times.

The work tells the story of Biblical creation and the early days of Eden, foreshadowing the fall from grace. The performance overall was rich, lush and satisfying, presenting great caramel-flavored swirls of sound. The choir was always precise in phrasing, and stunning in its presentation of big, wide-open chords.

Soprano Deanna Horjus-Lang was bold and athletic; bass Brian Leeper presented a fine anchor throughout. Madeline Olson, as Eve, performed with bright ease. J. Adam Shelton was a stand-out as the angel Uriel, with his fine, clear tenor.

Many of the soloists were drawn from the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, as was conductor Robert Gehrenbeck, who led the choirs and fine orchestra in a spare, effective manner.

The auditorium of the Masonic Center revealed itself as an excellent space for live classical presentation, with little or no amplification evident or even necessary. The center is too seldom-used, despite its history as a home for the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra’s annual presentation of Handel’s Messiah in the 1980s.

Let’s hope for many more concerts there from the outstanding Wisconsin Chamber Choir and Stoughton Chamber Singers.   

The concert was made possible in part by support from the Dane County Cultural Affairs Commission and the Overture Foundation.

For a previous article on the Masonic Center’s performance space, see my Isthmus article at http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=29485.

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On a side note, portions of the copyrighted program notes, by UW-Whitewater Department of Music chair J. Michael Allsen, appear identical to the work’s entry on Wikipedia.

For example, take Allsen’s assessment of The Creation: “It was also quite obviously an act for this deeply religious man, who appended the words ‘praise to God’ to the end of every completed composition. He later remarked that: ‘I was never so devout as when I was at work on The Creation: I fell on my knees each day and begged God to give me the strength to finish the work.’ ”

The Wikipedia entry reads, “It was also a profound act of faith for this deeply religious man, who appended the words ‘Praise to God’ at the end of every completed composition. He later remarked, ‘I was never so devout as when I was at work on The Creation,' ” etc.

Again, from Allsen’s program notes, reporting the work’s unveiling and reaction by impresario Johann Peter Salomon:

“The performance was sponsored by a group of noble citizens, who paid Haydn handsomely for the right to stage the premiere. (Salomon briefly threatened to sue, on the grounds that the English libretto had been translated illegally.) The performance was delayed until late April – the parts were not finished until Good Friday – but the full oratorio was rehearsed before a full audience on April 29.”

And from Wikipedia: “The first performances in 1798 were sponsored by a group of noble citizens, who paid the composer handsomely for the right to stage the premiere (Salomon briefly threatened to sue, on grounds that the English libretto had been translated illegally). The performance was delayed until late April  -- the parts were not finished until Good Friday -- but the completed work was rehearsed before a full audience on April 29.”

 The Wiki entry is not footnoted. It appears to be based in part on 2009 program notes created by the European Culture Society of Vienna, which in turn appear to liberally quote the liner notes from a 1969 recording by the Berlin Harmonic.

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