Berkshire Choral Festival
Berkshire School, Sheffield, MA
July 20, 2013
by Michael J. Moran
Guest conductor Jerry Blackstone, director of choirs and
chair of the conducting department at the University of Michigan School of
Music, led the Springfield Symphony Orchestra, the Chorus of the Berkshire
Choral Festival, and two vocal soloists in compelling performances of music by
Lauridsen and Vaughan Williams in the second concert of BCF’s 2013 season.
At age 70, Morton Lauridsen may be considered the dean of
living American choral composers.
A longtime music professor at the University of Southern California, he
wrote the 17-minute cycle “Mid-Winter Songs,” setting five poems by Robert
Graves, in 1980 for USC’s centennial. The music is more agitated than usual for
Lauridsen, from the chilling “Lament for Pasiphae” to the playful “Mid-Winter
Waking” and the dramatic “Intercession in Late October,” with its long poignant
ending. The men and women of the chorus captured the shifting moods of the
music with clarity and assurance, and with sensitive accompaniment from the
orchestra.
Two of the greatest works for chorus and orchestra by the
English master Ralph Vaughan Williams completed the concert. He wrote the “Five
Mystical Songs” to four poems by George Herbert (two songs are based on the
same poem) for the Worcester Three Choirs Festival in 1911. Baritone Timothy
Lefebvre was a mellifluous soloist, and the chorus was especially moving in its
wordless passages during the sublime central song, “Love Bade Me Welcome.” The
orchestral playing throughout this radiant cycle was suitably rapturous.
Closing the program after intermission was the cantata “Dona
Nobis Pacem,” written in 1937 to biblical texts and Civil War poems by Walt
Whitman for the Huddersfield Choral Society as a plea by Vaughan Williams for
peace in a world increasingly threatened by war. Chorus and orchestra were
joined by baritone Lefebvre and soprano Sun Young Chang for a viscerally
exciting performance.
Two among many vocal highlights were: Lefebvre’s tender
singing of the words “my enemy is dead, a man as divine as myself” in Whitman’s
poem “Reconciliation;” and Chang’s recurrent and heartrending cries of “Dona
nobis pacem,” especially when echoed by the chorus at the hushed close.
