|
A Note from the Artistic Director
De Profundis
Terry Schlenker
This work was written in 2010, commissioned by Terry’s own alma mater, the University of North Dakota, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Grand Forks Master Chorale, Joshua Bronfman, director. It was premiered by the dedicatees in early 2011, thus making tonight’s performance its second. Terry sets this traditionally penitential Psalm in a quiet, pleading way, rather than with any overt lamentation, and it therefore felt like the right way to begin this concert ten years after the fact, where the full force of our grief over the losses incurred on 9/11 are past. This work recalls that grief quietly and introspectively.
Carols
of Death William Schuman
Written in 1958 while Schuman was the president of the Juilliard School of Music, these three
pieces take some of Whitman’s best-known poems about death, and treat them with the utmost sensitivity. The first is the most dissonant, as if representing the futile resistance mankind puts up against the inevitable. The next is the fastest of the set, tracing the path of the soul gliding into that unknown region which comes on the other side of death – sometimes peacefully, sometimes with force; sometimes with terror, sometimes with hope . The third is the most consonant, representing the gentle side of death, or the yearning of the tired soul for the serenity of peace and rest. It forms the perfect bridge into the next section of the concert, where the grieving soul has moved on to a search for meaning and comfort.
Nox Arumque
Eric Whitacre
Although this text has nothing directly to do with the events of 9/11, I find its imagery and message to be utterly – almost eerily – interconnected with it. “Tarnished and Dark, Singing itself to sleep” seems to evoke the destruction of the day; the “gilded blade” coupled with flight imagery seems to evoke the weapons used on 9/11; an angel “dreaming of war,” and “tears” as the “cost of war,” seem to presage the “War on Terror” born out of 9/11; and finally, the re-awakening, the taking flight, the melting “of weapon into wing” (the reverse of how airplanes – wings – were transformed into weapons), seems to rekindle hope and the possibility for joy. “Let us soar again, High above this wall… with wings made of dawn, of gold, of dream.” There is something noble in this release – not through the exacting of revenge, but choosing to voluntarily forego retribution – that speaks powerfully to me.
To A Wild Rose
Edward MacDowell
I chose this piece as a reflection on the peaceful woods and fields where United
Flight 93 went down in Pennsylvania. As a prevention of greater tragedy at the cost of their own lives, this was one of the many heroic episodes of that day, and I am herein celebrating the noble self-sacrifice wrought in that rural setting.
Lux Aeterna
Edwin Fissinger
Setting the first few words of the Requiem, but in a non-liturgical and entirely fanciful way, Fissinger explores the many hues of eternal light in this piece. Hints of plainchant; large stacked chords, slowly building; outbursts of joy; this variety of moods all lead to my personal favorite section of the piece at the end, where the choir repeats quietly and meditatively the mantra
requiescant in pace (“rest in peace”) while a soprano soloists floats and dances above it like a feather, or a soul flirting with the hereafter, until all fades into silence.
Songs of Farewell
C. Hubert H. Parry
While each of these six songs has an overtly Christian text; and while the point of view of each author is someone approaching death in a thoughtful, measured way (as opposed to the sudden, violent end of those who died on 9/11); these works still poignantly convey many a thought connected with the tragedy – particularly the soul struggling with death and suffering – and are therefore a fitting concluding centerpiece for this concert.
Written in the final year of his life, conscious of his coming death, Parry brilliantly labors with this inevitability, sometimes taking comfort in religious imagery of an afterlife, sometimes in sentimental depictions of meeting old friends on the other side, and sometimes in glorious depictions of a sort of mythic resurrection at the end of all things. Each of these is beautifully and artfully rendered in the late-romantic idiom of his day.
But the final words of the entire set, from Psalm 39, reveal the tenacity of an individual in clinging to the last few hours and days of life, unwilling, even after attempts at persuasion and comfort, to let go.
“O spare me a little, before I go hence…” Even after heroic statements of joy in the face of death; of resigned readiness and weariness; of comfort in seeing old friends; there is the final clinging of an old man to life, pleading to be spared for just a little bit longer. This vulnerability is what gives utter humility and poignancy to the set, in my view – an admission that, even after sampling all the comforts that religion and philosophy have to offer, the soul will always cling to life.
Timothy J. Krueger
September 2011
©
2005 Timothy J. Krueger
|