Unfamiliar choral works beautifully rendered
The choir in performance
A concert programme with mostly unfamiliar classical choral works can seem a daunting prospect. But the thoughtful selection of music by conductor Harin Amirthanathan, loosely centred around the night as a time for reflection and restoration, quickly dispelled such misgivings.
The first half featured relatively unknown songs with music by Edward Elgar. The lyrics were written by Elgar’s wife Alice in the style of Bavarian folksongs as a kind of homage to the summer holidays the couple spent in southern Bavaria. The music is a world away from the rousing imperial rhythms of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance marches, once a staple of the BBC proms, or the melancholy of the composer’s Nimrod. The loveliest of the half dozen Bavarian-influenced songs was a mother’s lullaby, appropriately so perhaps for a concert titled Sure on this Shining Night.
Brahms Sechs Quartette, Op. 112a, based on moving poems by Franz Kugler followed. The first two of the trio are reflections on how the night quietens but does not always succeed in vanquishing the storms of the heart. The three Brahms songs were beautifully paced and beautifully sung, in contrast to the Elgar songs, a couple of which sometimes had the excessive boisterousness of folk songs.
The shift in mood to the second half was heralded by Tamara Holsinger’s elecello recital of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise, Opus 34, accompanied by Dilan Angunawela on the piano. This instrumental recital was almost like a balm after the emotion of the Brahms. The programme shifted again, this time to contemporary classical music, none of which this reviewer had heard before. Stephen Chatman’s Dawn of Night: II Hush, Hush was perhaps the most ambitious of the evening, combining subtle vocal melodies with Holsinger’s supple cello playing and lovely arpeggios for the piano, elegantly delivered by Angunawela.
It is to the credit of the choir that perhaps the most instantly addictive composition was Northern Lights by the Norwegian composer Ola Gjelo, sung in Latin. Gjelo lives in New York, but his melody was for me a throwback to the choruses of Russian composers. The best known of the modern composers selected by Amirthanathan was the Grammy Award-winning Eric Whitacre. He wrote “Sing Gently” as a response to the pandemic. The choir excelled at articulating the beautiful phrasing and the handoffs between the sopranos and contraltos to the basses and the tenors were impeccable. Perhaps the words spoke to this close-knit choir – “May we stand together, always. May our voice be strong”.
Fittingly, the composition from which the evening took its inspiration and title from, Morton Lauridsen’s Sure on this Shining Night was the grandest of finales as the penultimate performance, uplifting even while contemplating loss. The choir’s deft singing, underlined in a repeating groove of words such as ‘shining’ and ‘weep’ brought out the expressiveness of the song. “All is healed, all is health…hearts all whole” is perhaps a universal wish after wrenching waves of crises.
The Colombo Philharmonic Choir full of strong, mostly young voices shone on Sunday night. Amirthanathan’s conducting managed to be subtle with small gestures, yet the choir packed a hefty vocal punch one associates with a larger group. The bold repertoire showed a confidence that belied Amirthanathan’s youth. Most of the pieces had not been performed in Sri Lanka before.The performance at St Andrew’s Scots Kirk was without amplification and yet carried to the back of the church and beyond.
For those who stayed after the choir had been warmly congratulated, an utterly spontaneous treat awaited, as Amirthanathan whimsically played a few notes of the Hallelujah Chorus from Handel’s Messiah. Instantly, as if in an orchestrated flash mob video, the choir sang it with such gusto that the rafters of this pretty church must have been shaken. They swayed, they adlibbed with harmonies as Gospel choirs do so often, formed a circle and moved around the piano.
The unintended encore signalled a way forward in performing in a more relaxed manner that breaks away from the rigid performance conventions of the western classical repertory while remaining devoted to its spirit.
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