The Crossing choir sings composers of last 60 years
After centuries of defining, refining, and perfecting a profound lyrical relationship between the singing voice and the words that are sung, Italian composers of the last 60 years often have occupied themselves with testing the limits of what music can be.
After centuries of defining, refining, and perfecting a profound lyrical relationship between the singing voice and the words that are sung, Italian composers of the last 60 years often have occupied themselves with testing the limits of what music can be.
Having worked for several seasons at the Spoleto (Italy) Festival of Two Worlds, the Crossing choir director Donald Nally clearly acquired firsthand sympathy for this generation of composers - and brought them to his home venue (Saturday at Presbyterian Church of Chestnut Hill) in one of his gutsiest programs, but one bound to be among his least popular.
The possible godfather to these fearless moderns - including Salvatore Sciarrino and Bruno Bettinelli - was Carlo Gesualdo, the tortured, self-debasing 16th-century maverick long considered a lurid dead end in the late Renaissance. We now know that even his more aberrant effects were also used by his even-tempered contemporaries. Now, Gesualdo mainly holds the door open to current composers for dark, stark explorations of human experience.
No typical musical progression was to be heard in Le campane di Leopardi by Israeli composer Yehuda Yannay; Giacomo Leopardi's words speak to the insomnia of a frightened child, but the piece repeated an open-ended chord progression while a bass from the Crossing counted ominously in Italian, sometimes to 10, sometimes to 3. Such poetic incongruities could be interpreted endlessly, and if that didn't make listening more enjoyable, there was at least a trancelike atmosphere with tuned water glasses.
Though Sciarrino enjoys much credibility in new-music circles, I once fled the stultifying repetition of his Macbeth opera. His 2001 Responsorio delle tenebre took a number of familiar musical elements, such as plainchant and psalm tones, bent and twisted them like car-accident wreckage - all highly original - but with obscure expressive purposes. Sometimes you send the canary into the coal mine, and it just doesn't come back.
Bettinelli, who had four short pieces on the program, cut a more moderate profile - open to experimentation, yet with an ear for soft but astonishing harmonic resolutions in the 1995 O Notte and the 1993 Sia Calma.
The program's unlikely savior for these ears was the American composer Stephen Paulus, who was represented by his 1987 Madrigali di Michelangelo, a five-movement setting of the artist's visceral poems (similar to Gesualdo in spirit), often using the chorus as a consolidated super-voice - a single entity giving focused lyrical life to the words but with expression-heightening magnitude not possible with only a solo voice. In a poem about falling in love with appearances, Paulus repeated the phrase "beautiful thing" numerous times, with mild dissonances conveying the inevitable disappointment.
Never was the Crossing's typically high performance standard more apparent than in the final movement, which calls for a particularly long line of musical thought that the singers sustained with almost casual heroism.