Tag Archives: Gustav Holst

Caritas a Cappella Delivers a Mix of Ancient and Modern Gems

Review: Caritas a Cappella Ensemble @ St. Alban’s

By Perry Tannenbaum

January 19, 2025, Davidson, NC – With so many churches in the metro Charlotte area, it’s little wonder that the Queen City is fertile ground for choirs and choristers – and receptive audiences for choral music. Considering this profusion of talent and activity, as well as the total absence of Caritas A Cappella Ensemble press releases in my voluminous mailbox and the lack of catch-up info on the Caritas website, I was able to forgive myself for not having known about this organization, founded by Cathy Youngblood in 2017, until signing up for this review.

More ominous, as we entered the St. Alban’s Episcopal Church, was the elephant in the room: a spanking new grand piano in the middle of the sanctuary, standing in front of two rows of music stands where the singers would be placing their iPads and music scores. Was there somebody at Caritas HQ (if there’s more to it than the PO Box given at the website) who needed to learn the meaning of a cappella?

Thankfully, the piano was there for a delayed pre-show, so the mammoth obstacle turned out to be a blessing. For once, my wife Sue and I had arrived early enough for a Music at St. Alban’s concert to take in the prelude event, where star students from the Davidson area are given the opportunity to play for an audience and warm us up for the featured guests.

Those of us who had arrived on time for the pre-show were rewarded, while awaiting the arrival of Tianyang Chen, with a couple of delightful morsels of Brahms from his teacher, Cynthia Lawing. Once Chen had gone through his recital of pieces by Ginastera, Liszt, Brahms, and Debussy, the elephant could be moved to make way for the marquee players.

Surprises didn’t cease with the piano’s exit. Caritas artistic director Jeremy Mims entered the sanctuary in the usual way, but the Ensemble didn’t take their places behind the music stands. Instead, they encircled the audience – men in front, women at the rear of the hall – for the opening selection, “Musick’s Empire” from Triptych by Lloyd Pfautsch (1921-2003). Besides the ethereal surround sound blend, this presentation heightened the drama when Mims cued the female voices. Fittingly, the outré deployment of the Ensemble was devoted to a modern piece. It wasn’t until the singers took their places after this opening that the title of their concert, “A Capella Through the Ages,” could be fulfilled in a more orderly, chronological manner.

Fussing a bit with the printed program, replacing a couple of titles on the list with new selections and occasionally shuffling the order of performance, the concert kept to its original design, flashing back to the Baroque days of Vivaldi, Palestrina, and the Scarlattis with a nice mix of sacred and secular lyrics. Whether it’s Handel or Bach, we hear many of the mightiest works from that wondrous era, so it was nice to sample these less familiar gems.

What interested me most on the program was the predominance of more modern pieces, from the days of Bruckner, Holst and Vaughan Williams to the present day. Pieces like these, which sound surprisingly retro compared to the modern chamber and orchestral pieces we’re familiar with, have always been mainstays at Spoleto Festival USA concerts down in Charleston, SC, so I was eager to see how these performances would compare and how a North Carolina audience would react.

The composers’ names were no less intriguing and enticing. We don’t readily recognize contemporary composers Elaine Hagenberg (1979-), Kevin Memley (1971-), Eric Whitacre (1970-), and Pärt Uusberg (1986-) by their last names. As for Frank Tichelli (1958-), whose “Earth Song” was inserted after the program was printed, I was nowhere close to knowing how to spell his name when Mims announced it. “Sikelly” was my first stab. Well-matched to the slow-paced, richly-scored music, Earth’s lyric was rather simple at its core: “Oh war and power, you blind and blur. The torn heart cries out in pain. In pain. But music and singing have been my refuge, and music and singing shall be my light.”

Uniquely, the beauty of the hallelujahs later on was more like a solemn sunset than a jubilant festival. Sadly, Caritas’s enunciation was no clearer than that of multiple recordings – including one by the famed Seraphic Fire – I sampled on Spotify, which offered welcome first aid in deciphering the lovely lyrics. Consonants were often unclear, vain routinely indistinguishable from pain. And vowels! Try to hear “light” when that word pops up!

Never again will I blame myself for losing track of what a choir is singing in Latin (or any other foreign language) when I have the printed text before me. For that reason alone, Uusberg’s magical “Ōhtul” nudged “Earth Song” aside for me as the most impressive piece on the program. Since translations were appended to the program, full contentment with the performance was a simpler matter. The grand swell, as the poet’s song paddled away, was a lovely surprise after everything else – bird, little flower, and forest trees – had been silenced and lulled to sleep by the twilight. Erkki-Sven Tüür (1959-) and Arvo Pärt (1935-) will need to leave some space for this youngster on their pedestal as my favorite Estonian composers.

As for the practice of printing translations for vocal performances, a brief word. Follow the practice of most opera companies nowadays who project subtitles even when the operas are performed in English. Print the English texts with the translations for our fullest enjoyment.

“Nunc Dimitis” by Gustav Holst (1874-1934) impressed me nearly as much as the Uusberg, with solos from soprano Sarah Ochoa and tenor Nicholas Setzer. The soloists not only sang their brief solos purely, they set the stage for responses from the Ensemble at a dramatically augmented volume. Wisely, the Latin didn’t appear in the program, clearing the pathway to pleasure when we went straight to the translation.

Of course, the fullest experiences at this concert came from songs in our language that were either familiar to us or readily grasped in real time. The most enjoyable of these included Hagenberg’s joyous “Alleluia,” though it sported few more words aside from amen, and the finale that followed, “Ezekiel Saw de Wheel” as arranged by William L. Dawson (1899-1990). Most surprising of all was Vaughan Williams’ “O Mistress Mine,” from his Three Elizabethan Part-Songs, a rather frisky departure for a composer better known for the grandeur of A Sea Symphony, the anguish and majesty of Job,and the simple tragedy of Riders to the Sea.

Gerald Finzi’s “My spirit sang all day,” mercifully brief, didn’t really speak to me, and “Shenadoah,” as arranged by James Erb (1926-2014) disappointed. Crossing the “wide Missouri,” we have an inalienable right to more bass and sinew between the shores. Bypassing my personal distaste for the foundational baby-worship that pervades Christianity, the pairing of Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque” and Memley’s “O Magnum Mysterium” were more pleasing to me in Latin, since ignoring the translations – and savoring Memley’s heavenly harmonies – was an option.

Amusingly enough, I had to adjust my attitude toward Caritas’s choice of William Billings’ “I am the Rose of Sharon” past the midway point of a largely repetitive and pedestrian performance. When the famed snippet from the Song of Solomon reached its denouement, “for, lo, the winter is past and the rain is gone,” you could look out the huge St. Alban’s windows and see that the rain really was stopping in response to these pertinent repetitions.

If you missed that, you couldn’t help but notice streaks of bright sunlight suddenly streaming across the front rows of singers. In his intro to the piece, Mims had hoped that the concluding verse would bring an end to the rain. But the power of Caritas’s incantations exceeded this extravagant hope. Repetitions and all, you won’t find me arguing with such cosmic success!

Photos by Perry Tannenbaum

Ukraine’s Colors Shine Through Charlotte Symphony Celebration

**Review: Dona Nobis Pacem at Belk Theater**

By Perry Tannenbaum

2022~Dona Nobis Pacem-31

March 12, 2022, Charlotte, NC – When 57 musicians gathered at the Carolina Theatre on Tryon Street to present the inaugural Charlotte Symphony concert on March 20, 1932, none of them could have possibly predicted how the orchestra’s 90^th anniversary would be celebrated in 2022. Three of the five pieces that Christopher Warren-Green conducted, nearing the end of his distinguished tenure as Symphony’s music director, hadn’t been written yet, and one of the composers hadn’t been born. Even last May, when CSO’s 2021-22 season was announced, Warren-Green himself couldn’t have predicted how grimly appropriate Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Dona Nobis Pacem would be for the occasion. As originally conceived, the program was an olive branch from England to America, three British composers conducted by one of the Crown’s finest, two of the pieces paying homage to Walt Whitman, our greatest poet.

A small dent in the all-English lineup turned up when Symphony’s Australian second trombone, Thomas Burge, finished enough of his to-be-continued “Charlotte Symphony Fanfare” for it to serve as a preamble to the orchestra’s celebration. What truly turned the tone of the anniversary festivities upside-down was Vladimir Putin’s horrific invasion of Ukraine, lending Dona Nobis Pacem – “Grant us peace” – unforeseen pertinence and meaning. With St. Patrick’s Day weekend revelers teeming along the sidewalks and spilling over onto Tryon and Fifth Streets, there was a dramatic contrast for concertgoers who became pedestrians shortly after hearing Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and the Dona Nobis at Belk Theater on Saturday night. The most festive of the night’s festivities were outside the hall.

Burge’s new composition will no doubt impress more when it takes its intended place at the launch of a future Symphony’s classics season and the composer’s showy post-pandemic staging can be realized: three brass choirs spread out across the Belk balcony. For the 90^th, the brass battalion was confined behind the masked string sections, but the peep we had into the work-in-progress was sunny and glorious. Gustav Holst’s Walt Whitman Overture, a youthful piece completed in 1899 when the composer would turn 25, was arguably the most sustained celebration of the evening, though it might be somewhat deflating to learn that Holst had been dead for over 48 years when the piece was first performed in 1982. The transparent violins at the beginning, hovering over churning basses and cellos before flutes and brass peeped in, struck me more like Schubert than any American or British music. When the brass first broke through, however, there may have been a glint of Sousa, and the final swell of the piece was in a grand Victorian vein.

The Four Scottish Dances by Malcolm Arnold (1921-2006), premiered in 1957, were clearly the most winsome offering of the evening, shuttling between slow and fast tempos – not only between dances but sometimes within them. Inspired by Louis Armstrong more strongly than by Whitman, Arnold’s music displayed a more American élan, geniality, and broad humor than the other Brits’. If your head wasn’t spinning from the abrupt acceleration that Warren-Green called forth in the opening “Strathspey Pesante,” which ended with a pedestrian “shave and a haircut” phrase, then the slowdown in the ensuing Vivace (Reel), initiated by Joshua Hood galumphing on his bassoon, would certainly have caught your ear. And if that weren’t sufficient mischief, Warren-Green’s hambone slacking and slouching at the podium added a visual cue. Perish the thought that Maestro Warren-Green’s predecessor, Christof Perick, would ever have tainted himself with such levity.

After these pranks, which reminded me of the Western merriment in Copland’s folksier pieces, the work of principal harpist Andrea Mumm Trammell, principal flutist Victor Wang, and oboist Erica Cice was sublime in the penultimate “Hebridean Song,” shining through the shimmer of the strings. The concluding “Highland Fling” had as much Scottish flavor as the “Pesante,” rushing at us unabated with sudden shifts in volume, the tweedling of the high woodwinds answered by onrushes of orchestra colored with fiery alarms from the trombones.

If the customary programming conventions for galas were being observed, I’d strongly question the wisdom of delaying the comparatively solemn and serene Tallis Fantasia until after Arnold’s suite, which would have sent us off to intermission in a lighter mood. But Symphony president David Fisk had already solemnized the occasion by dedicating the concert “to Ukraine and the courage, strength, and resilience of its people,” a theme that would subsequently be echoed in the digital program and by Warren-Green, when he prefaced his performance of the Dona Nobis. By coincidence surely, Vaughan-Williams composed his 1910 Fantasia very similarly to Burge’s spanking new “Fanfare,” dividing his aggregation of strings into three parts, two string orchestras with a string quartet within the larger orchestra. Concertmaster Calin Ovidiu Lupanu had the last and most eloquent solo among those doled out to the four principal string players, but kudos should also go to principal violist Benjamin Geller, whose solo launched the memorable quartet episode.

What will stand out for me, however, was the extraordinary alchemy of this performance. Whether it has always been baked into Vaughan-Williams’ orchestration, maybe something special that Warren-Green was able to elicit from his musicians, or whether it was the unprecedented high placement of the small string orchestra on the platform where the Charlotte Master Chorale would soon sing, flush against the upstage vestigial pipes at the Belk… I could have sworn that there was a softly playing organ in the orchestral mix. Needless to say: amazing. 2022~Dona Nobis Pacem-27

Those organ pipes were more verifiably involved in the culminating performance of the Dona Nobis Pacem, after more than 40 Master choristers filed in, followed by our two guest soloists: soprano Christina Pier and, in his Charlotte debut, bass-baritone Daniel Okulitch. It was then that Warren-Green dedicated this piece to the valiant, freedom-loving people of Ukraine. Between the moment that the maestro turned away from us and Symphony began to play, those silvery pipes, illuminated until then entirely in blue light, suddenly became halved into stripes of gleaming blue and yellow gold, the colors of the Ukrainian flag. A proud moment for us all.

Whether prescribed by COVID protocols, Warren-Green’s decree, or the unmasked singers’ personal preferences, Pier and Okulitch sat further apart than the vocal soloists we usually encounter at Symphony concerts. With Pier mostly singing the “Agnus Dei” refrain that contains the Latin title, and Okulitch confining himself in the middle movements in Walt Whitman’s English – and Old Testament translations in the Finale – the separation between the singers wasn’t awkward at all.

2022~Dona Nobis Pacem-24

Pier tended to sing with the orchestra and the choir, but there was an extended stretch where Okulitch, standing to Warren-Green’s right, was accompanied solely by Lupanu, seated to his left. So the tableau enhanced the intimacy of their duet. What was really unfortunate and compromising for us were the vast stretches of incomprehensible text from the chorus that Vaughan-Williams had scored so splendidly. If there had been supertitles above the stage or printed programs in our hands, the experience would have been even more powerful. Those of us who were able to download the digital program were adequately equipped, but the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center has had repeated problems with transmitting these copious, colorful, and informative materials.

In future performances where we’re expecting to follow along at the Belk, I will try to download the digital materials before I leave home. Clearest of all was the chorus’s mighty “Beat! Beat! Drums!” refrain from one of Whitman’s most metrical Civil War compositions. Even when we might be lost in the less familiar words of other war poems by the Good Gray Poet (“Reconciliation” and “Dirge for Two Veterans”), the music, the voices, and the colors of the fighting Ukrainians’ flag landed on us forcefully. It was thrilling.

Originally published on 3/14 at CVNC.org

All-English Symphony Program Moves from Wintry Dreariness to Triumphant Jollity

Review: Charlotte Symphony Plays Holst + Elgar

By Perry Tannenbaum

Assailed by the ongoing pandemic, the postponement of vaccinations, and a midwinter cold snap, we must be contented when we receive short rations of Edward Elgar without pomp or percussion and William Walton’s Henry V without winds or brass. In fact, since Charlotte Symphony music director Christopher Warren-Green often shuttles back and forth across the Atlantic to lead our Queen City orchestra and the London Chamber Orchestra, we’re rather fortunate just to have him on the podium at Knight Theater conducting an all-English program. Traveling by air between the UK and the US has become uncertain in recent months, due to the mutating coronavirus, and restrictions pushed Symphony’s Holst + Elgar offering from January 23 into February. Electricity can also be capricious when the Arctic is riled: Texas is merely the most notorious state plagued by power outages this month, not the only one.

We’ve heard more than a couple of Serenades since Symphony returned, string players only, reconfiguring its 2020-21 season and fine tuning on-the-fly. Elgar’s Serenade for Strings in E minor was certainly not the peppiest or the most sweeping of the breed, but Warren-Green, stressing the harmonic blend of the piece instead of its rhythmic flow, gave us a drearier reading than I would have hoped for, particularly in the first two movements, a tranquil and dreamy Allegro piacevole followed by a sleepier Larghetto. Only in the concluding Allegretto did Warren-Green abandon extreme delicacy and pick up his baton. Only now did the orchestra’s energy compare with the more light-hearted Sir Roger Norrington recording of the piece. Here there was more melodic dialogue between the upper and lower strings, more satisfying swells in the sway of the dynamics.

Although Walton’s Two Pieces for Strings from Henry V have been paired on commercial recordings, they are hardly a representative foretaste of the full musical score written for the 1945 film starring – and directed by – Laurence Olivier. Elsewhere in the score, in places such as the “Charge and Battle” and the “Agincourt Song” collected in more extensive suites, Warren-Green could parade Symphony’s winds, brass, and percussion. Mightily. “Death of Falstaff” and “Touch Her Soft Lips and Part” are soft, brief, and fragile flowers compared to those sturdy oaks, yet they were more affecting than the Elgar pieces. The Passacaglia for Sir John was quiet and grave, almost but not quite a dirge, and the “Soft Lips” was tenderly suffused with pure and chaste ardor, tinged with the sorrow of soldiers’ farewells. Count me as enthusiastically supportive if Warren-Green opts to program a fuller representation of this Henry V score when he can bring the full Symphony to the task.

If we longed for music that quietly reflected our mood during these cold, gray, homebound winter days and nights, then these Elgar and Walton works more than fulfilled their mission, but if it was uplift that we sought, then Gustav Holst’s St Paul’s Suite in C Major was a perfect tonic. Warren-Green’s anecdote about meeting Olivier and Walton after a performance of the Henry pieces was by far the most appealing of his intros. Warren-Green had been onstage as the concertmaster that night, and the actor and the composer had vied ridiculously with each other at the post-performance reception to be more modest about his contribution to that celebrated film. Yet the insight into Holst, when Warren-Green visited the St. Paul’s Girls School in London, was also fascinating. Holst taught at the school, eventually becoming its music director, and a soundproof room was built specially for him at the school where he composed his most famous work, The Planets, as well as this more modest suite.

To be honest, St. Paul’s sounds more like it was written in the middle of the girls’ playground on a bright sunny spring morning with the children running and squealing in all directions around the composer, especially in the effervescent outer movements. Amid the lively opening Vivace, ebulliently labeled as a Jig, it was inspiring to see Warren-Green jumping up and down on the podium again, excitedly gesticulating after maintaining his British dignity for these many months. The liveliness spread across the Knight stage, and I strongly suspect that the masked faces of the Symphony musicians were smiling. Even the middle movements had a youthful élan. The second movement was a quiet Ostinato at a Presto pace, with concertmaster Calin Lupanu floating a melody over the subdued churning of the upper strings and pizzicatos from the cellos. Lupanu’s soloing resumed in the Intermezzo, where we slowed to Andante con moto and principal violist Benjamin Geller took a couple of turns in the solo spotlight. Here again, a Vivace interlude abruptly shed its orchestral sunlight before we reverted to a slower tempo, ending with a sedate string quartet led by Lupanu.

Jollity reigned when we arrived at Holst’s Finale, an Allegro that riffs on an English folk tune, “The Dargason,” sounding even merrier than the opening Jig, and certainly more familiar. Holst further enhanced the merriment and complexity of his composition by giving the cellos the undercover assignment of introducing the ancient melody of “Greensleeves” under the main theme. No problem if you missed “Greensleeves” while it was part of the cellos’ stealth operation, because it became gloriously dominant when it was reprised. The infectious “Dargason” was not to be suppressed for long, interweaving so well with “Greensleeves,” and Lupanu had one more tasty little cadenza before the full string orchestra pounced on the final fortissimo chords.