Singers stretched to their utmost: Mass Merge makes fine mix of new, old sacred repertoire

by David Gordon Duke

MASS MERGE
Vancouver Cantata Singers
Christ Church Cathedral/West Vancouver United Church,
Nov. 6 and 7.

Vancouver Cantata Singers’ Mass Merge was an ingenious concept: choose disparate settings of the ordinary of the Mass, and connect them with further sacred repertoire. The resulting program had variety and a type of automatic coherence often hard to achieve in choral concerts.

In making his choices, director Eric Hannan favoured his strengths with featured repertoire from the late 19th century to the present. The program began, however, with a processional rendition of the first of four early chant selections. The Kyrie was by Joseph Rheinberger, a sweet, even effusive example of musical Victoriana that established a fine level of choral work from the ensemble. In place of a Gloria, the choir premiered Vancouver composer Peter Hannan’s Gloria Tropes, a collage of non-Christian spiritual texts in English interpolated with the traditional Latin Gloria. This is a significant composition, but by no means a“safe”choral piece: the singers were stretched to their outmost presenting the composer’s wealth of ideas, none more attractive than the fluid, melting sonorities used for much of the Latin text.

Irish-born Charles Villiers Stanford, a London-based equivalent of Rheinburger, was represented by two of his well-made (and well sung) motets. The program’s conscious interplay between old and new was made explicit in two excerpts from Estonian composer Arvo Part’s wonderful Berliner Messe of 1990.

Conductor Hannan’s approach to Palestrina’s Credo (from the ‘Tu es Petrus’ Mass) raised questions of taste. It often felt as though the fervid sentimentality of Rheinberger and Stanford was starting to colour his interpretation of the 16th-century master. Similarly. Tudor composer John Sheppard’s undemonstrative setting of the Lord’s Prayer was ill served by indulgent choral effects. Nor was all the repertoire in the second half of the program of top quality. Given the wealth of repertoire, Toronto composer Ruth Watson-Henderson’s pedestrian Sanctus and Benedictus and Samuel Barber’s Agnus Dei, a cheesy retread of his Adagio for Strings, were puzzling choices.

But the program was back soundly on track with a concluding psalm, Viadana’s brilliant early Baroque setting of Exultate justi, long a part of the VCS tradition. Given the potential for future Mass Merge programming, the weekend’s audiences may have seen the birth of what could become another fine tradition.

Vancouver Sun
9 Nov. 2004

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