40 years on Cantata’s choral music lives on

The Cantata Singers celebrates 40 years of public performances of choral music on September 15, when it performs Schubert’s Mass in B flat, D. 324, at the Kollupitiya Methodist Church at 7 p.m. under the baton of its founder-Director, Satyendra Chellappah. Also included in the programme for the evening are excerpts from Haydn’s oratorio, The Creation.

The first big work performed by the Cantata Singers was Mozart’s ‘Nelson’ Mass which featured Sri Lanka’s musical ‘greats’ of a bygone era – Lylie Godridge, Irangani Goonesinghe and Lorraine Abeysekera. Other major works included Handel’s oratorios Samson and Solomon, Vivaldi’s Gloria and Pergolosi’s Magnificat.

Chellappah’s choice as the main item to mark the Cantata Singers’ 40th year of performance was Schubert’s Mass in B flat, D. 324. Director Chellappah recalls the small beginnings of the Cantata Singers when the group, with only nine singers, gave regular radio broadcasts of four-part sacred and secular songs, madrigals and Negro spirituals.

Schubert’s most important contribution to music was in the field of lieder, considering that he had a profound understanding of the human voice and its ability to convey to the listener every shade of poetic meaning, be it tenderness, drama, or an evocation of nature. Of course he did write music in other genre, including six Masses, one of which is being performed on September 15 for the first time in Sri Lanka.

Schubert was surrounded by the Viennese tradition of music with its folk songs and landler, an Austrian waltz-time dance, and this influenced his style which was criticized by some as being commonplace.

Coming to the composer’s defence, musicologist Richard Campbell argues, “Of the commonplace sensuous experience, Schubert, by force of feeling, made a soaring aspiration of the waltz and hymn tunes.”

One cannot but marvel at the change in style and tempo in each movement of the Mass in B flat-the supplication in the Kyrie, the splendid stirring of the Gloria, and the dramatic treatment of the Credo with its appealing changes in rhythm and key. The B flat work is a beautiful example of this style.

Chellappah takes infinite pains to get the best out of the collective as well as the individual voices. Denham Pereira, a talented Organist, is the accompanist with Naveen Fernando (trumpet) and Satish Casie Chetty (violin). The soloists are Erico Perera (soprano), Peshali Yapa (mezzo-soprano), Jaliya Senanayake (tenor), Laknath Seneviratne (bass), Dilani David (soprano) and Asanga Perera (tenor).