The United States has a long, rich choral music tradition that extends from the Moravians to William Billings, from spirituals to Morten Lauridsen. And now there are a number of prominent younger composers diligently adding to this repertoire.
Minnesota-based Jake Runestad, who is only 29, is among these creators, and his new cantata, The Hope of Loving, had its world premiere this past week as the Miami concert choir Seraphic Fire opened its 14th season with performances in Miami-area venues, Fort Lauderdale and Naples.
Runestad’s 15-minute piece, written for chorus and string quartet, was accompanied brilliantly by four members of the New York period-ensemble orchestra The Sebastians, and tastefully and beautifully sung by the choir under the direction of its founder, Patrick Dupré Quigley.
Composed to texts by mystics and saints from various centuries and traditions, The Hope of Loving is organized as six separate but continuous pieces, five for the chorus or soloists, and one for the string quartet alone. Its texts are thoughtful aphorisms about the power of love, and the work’s title is taken from the last of them, by the 13th-century German theologian Meister Eckhart.
Runestad has a natural lyric gift, and a pronounced ability to write effectively for the human voice. His music is firmly in the neo-Romantic style that draws much of its harmonic vocabulary from pop and jazz traditions, a style that has become the lingua franca of contemporary composers who write primarily along melodic lines.
And so, The Hope of Loving went down prettily and easily, particularly in the fifth and sixth movements, when the full chorus was brought to bear in expansive fashion, opening up in lush vocal terracing as Eckhart’s words spoke of life made bearable only by “the hope of loving, of being loved.” Tenor Patrick Muehleise was the charming soloist in the brief third movement, “Wondrous Creatures,” and soprano Sarah Moyer and bass James Bass blended admirably in the fifth-movement duet, “My Soul Is a Candle.”
Violinist Nicholas DiEugenio was particularly fine in his role as first violinist, displaying a dark, intense sound that fit Runestad’s heart-on-sleeve music well. The audience Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale gave the work a warm ovation, and Quigley and Seraphic Fire deserve credit for commissioning a work whose expert instrumental and vocal writing and clear, sincere message should earn it a place on imaginative choral programs.
Although the work covers a lot of ground in a relatively short compass, it covers it a little too quickly. The third movement, for instance, is meant to be a brief, whimsical interlude (and it made the audience giggle), but sandwiched between a fleet-footed, heavily rhythmic second movement (“Wild Forces”) and a moody, introspective fourth movement for quartet alone, it got lost; it needs to be more expansive to survive its neighbors.
And the finale was also much too short to make a really effective ending. No sooner did the chorus begin singing than it was downsized to a hummed E-flat in octaves as the string quartet wrapped things up. Brevity is an overlooked virtue in composition, but here the texts and the music itself, which repeatedly draws on a unifying motif built around a falling pair of fourths, seemed to require more breadth to make a full impression, one that would show off this talented composer’s mind and heart to best effect.
The central work on the program was the early Mass in G (Mass No. 2, D. 167), a short sacred work written by an 18-year-old Franz Schubert for his parish church in the Vienna suburb of Lichtental. Instead of performing the Mass straight through, Quigley interpolated the Three Sacred Songs (Op. 69) of the Liechtensteiner organist and composer Josef Rheinberger between the movements, arguing in remarks to the audience that the Mass would have been interrupted by segments of the church service in its original performance.
For the Mass, organist Jeffrey Grossman and bassist Wen Yang joined the quartet, making for a flexible sextet version of Schubert’s original scoring for strings and organ. Quigley, as he often does, led the Mass with a swift, energetic hand, driving the music along and getting a confident performance from his singers, who no doubt individually have sung this work many times. There was no hint of any churchy mustiness about this reading of the Mass; Quigley’s emphasis on vigor gave the music a fresh, exciting feel.
Sara Guttenberg was the able soprano soloist, a singer with a big, powerful voice that seized the attention. Her first entrance in the Kyrie was somewhat too forceful, but overall she sang winningly. There was good singing, too, from tenor Stephen Soph and bass Charles Evans in the Benedictus.
The three Rheinberger songs, published in 1873 under one opus but dating as far back as 1855, are lovely pieces, rather four-square but with attractive melodies and very effective writing for five and six a cappella voices. There was some shaky intonation in the second of them, “Hymne,” but it was still pretty and sweet, and the third of the songs, “Abendlied,” was sung with a telling sense of repose.
There were three other relative rarities on this filled-to-the-brim first program: two motets by Brahms, and the Elegiac Song (Op. 118) of Beethoven. The Beethoven, written in 1814, is little-known but quite moving. The intensity of the opening string quartet passage as played by the Sebastians looked ahead to the late Beethoven quartets, and something of that weight was picked up by the chorus.
The two Brahms motets followed, beginning with his setting of Psalm 13 (Op. 27) and succeeded by “O Heiland, reiss die Himmel auf.” (Op. 74, No. 2) These two works are difficult to sing, particularly from the standpoint of ensemble unity, but the choir managed it nicely. “O Heiland,” a series of variations, was impressive for the choir’s mastery of increasingly intricate Brahmsian polyphony, but Quigley’s interpretation could have used some more contrast.
The Sebastians also gave the choir a rest before the Schubert by performing a trio sonata by Handel (in G minor, HWV 391), which they brought off with great flair and beauty.
Seraphic Fire next performs Nov. 6-8, when it will present the Coronation Anthems of Handel along with the Te Deum of Marc-Antoine Charpentier. For tickets and more information, call 305-285-9060 or visit www.seraphicfire.org.