There’s something profoundly satisfying about hearing early American choral music, even if the listener doesn’t identify with the white Protestant tradition that informs it.
Drawing on the modes of the British Isles and harmonized in a plain-lumber, honest-nails fashion, it speaks to our national history in a way that calls up images of hardworking, straightforward people in small market towns, making something entirely new in a fresh and favored land.
It can be heard in detail in the music of William Billings or the shape-note hymnody of the Sacred Harp, and some of it is there in the music of the Shaker tradition as well. On Thursday night, the Seraphic Fire concert choir opened its 11th season, and its second at St. Gregory’s Episcopal in Boca Raton, with a program of American choral music called Simple Gifts, a concert that began with three Shaker selections.
Conductor and choir founder Patrick Dupré Quigley led his 13 professional singers through the songs with his usual briskness, drawing out a sound of tense vigor showcased by the bare-bones arrangements of Philip Dieterrich (Followers of the Lamb) and Roger Hall (Typical Dancing). A certain intonation unsteadiness that underlines how hard it is to sing in unison was gone for the third selection, a sweet, warm reading of the Mount Lebanon Hymnal favorite Give Good Gifts to One Another.
Two major 20th-century American composers were featured next in two cycles: Five of the Old American Songs of Aaron Copland, and Samuel Barber’s three-part Reincarnations (Op. 16). The Copland songs (the arrangements are by Irving Fine, from Copland’s solo voice original) are a deserving classic of the repertoire, and the choir sang all of them beautifully.
It was in these songs – Simple Gifts, The Little Horses, Zion’s Walls, At the River and Ching-a-Ring Chaw – that the merit of the Seraphic Fire model, in which a corps of singers from across the country is assembled for the work, was first made so evident. All the phrases were carefully and precisely sung, the fine musicians on the St. Gregory’s altar expertly adjusting the blend of their voices as they performed. Joined by the excellent playing of pianist Anna Fateeva, Copland’s brilliant setting of these tunes, with their precisely designed accompaniments, was marvelously realized.
The faster section of the great lullaby The Little Horses was somewhat too fast for diction, and Quigley’s decision to run all five of the songs together with no pause was somewhat misguided: These are separate rooms under one roof, and they need space, i.e., a couple seconds between songs, to declare themselves. But the Barber cycle that followed, so infrequently heard in part because of its difficulty, was revelatory. These songs, set in 1940 to poems by the Irish writer James Stephens, are full of the richness of Barber’s mature style, which includes melodic power but also a kind of harmonic swiftness that gives the music a fleeting color palette in which each shade has to be thoroughly registered before the tones move on.
Sonic flexibility like that requires musicians of a high level of ability, and that was evident Thursday night in every bar. The second song, the dirge Anthony O’Daly, was especially poignant because of the way the singers brought out the three-note motif (Anthony!) that is such an important part of the compositional structure. And the third song, The Coolin, was sung with a leisurely tempo and a surpassingly gentle vocal melding that was entirely appropriate for this song of love.
The rest of the program consisted of work by living Americans, beginning with a quartet of songs by four different composers ranging in age from mid-20s to early 50s. Frank Ticheli, a veteran writer also celebrated for his band music, was represented by his Earth Song, a pretty, effective work about the consolations of art built around a repeated phrase, while the British-born Paul Crabtree turned to the words of Shaker founder Mother Ann Lee for his Death and Resurrection, the final part of his cycle Valley of Delight. It’s a moving, rapt work whose mostly simple harmonies carry the message of the words admirably well, and it was sung with restraint and loveliness.
The Light of Common Day, by the Miami-based Shawn Crouch, is a cannily crafted song set to a segment of Wordsworth’s Intimations of Immortality in which big, buzzing clusters are set off against a sparkling piano accompaniment; it has a radiant, optimistic sound that was most effective. The young Colin Britt’s As There Are Flowers, a setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s To Kathleen, is quiet and slow, with a deliberate, hushed tune that mirrors its text of loving devotion with warmth and directness. All four of these songs were sung masterfully, and the overall effect was to be impressed by the amount of first-rate choral writing being created by living American composers.
The concert closed with the three Nocturnes of the reigning king of American choral music, Morten Lauridsen. He has chosen three ravishing poems – by Rilke, Neruda and Agee – and set them appropriately, and with that near-pop ballad feel that is so distinctive a part of Lauridsen’s work and contemporary American choral work in general. Often we hear Lauridsen sung by large choral forces, which adds to the effect, but the music works just as well with a small, expert force such as Seraphic Fire.
The singers appeared to enjoy the chance to open up with in the two outer songs, Sa Nuit d’Été and Sure on This Shining Night, and in the middle song, Soneto de la Noche, baritone Charles Wesley Evans sang with an attractive richness. Sure on This Shining Night, one of the most popular of all Lauridsen’s pieces, took on all of its necessary rocky grandeur with a wide-open, generous vocal sound and the forceful playing of pianist Fateeva. The pieces came off wonderfully, and the large house at St. Gregory’s gave them abundant applause.
Because South Florida’s classical arts scene has had its bumpy rides over the years, and because the area doesn’t have the high national arts profile its vibrant level of activity should earn for it, it’s easy for arts journalists like me to over-praise Seraphic Fire because there are so few other local groups like it. The Los Angeles Times critic, for instance, found their selection as Grammy nominees early this year baffling, and I’ve talked to musicians who have reservations about Quigley’s generally aggressive conducting style and the sometimes non-standard approach the choir takes to some of its repertoire.
But Thursday’s concert should remind audiences here, and in Palm Beach County particularly, that if you miss a Seraphic Fire concert you are missing out on art, and that’s Art with a capital A. If that sounds pompous or pretentious, so be it: This is an ensemble, and an organization, that strives for maximum artistic impact each time it treads the boards, that has the horsepower to do it, and that hits far more often than it misses.
There simply isn’t any other way, except with world-class touring ensembles (which almost never come through here), that South Floridians can hear concerts like this, concerts of challenging, beautiful music, new and old, done so well and with such integrity. If you’ve somehow managed to miss them before, this should be the season to reconsider. They make South Florida’s artistic community better, and you owe it to yourself to hear why.
Seraphic Fire performs this concert tonight at the First United Methodist Church in Coral Gables, on Saturday night at All Saints Episcopal Church in Fort Lauderdale, and Sunday afternoon at Miami Beach Community Church in Miami Beach. Call 305-285-9060 or visit seraphicfire.org for tickets or more information.