“When we planned this music, months ago, we could not have imagined how the violence, suffering, and heroism of the past three weeks would affect us—and our audience,” said Harvard Pro Musica presidents Kathy Hewett and Phil LaFollette this week, as they discussed plans for their upcoming performance. The 50-member choral group will perform its spring concert, Into the Light, this Saturday, May 4, at 7:30 p.m. at St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church, 425 Central Street, Acton.
The concert will feature solos by three Harvard residents, among others, and professional accompanists, including organist Pauline Oliver and string musicians of the Indian Hill Orchestra based in Littleton. More than half the choral group comes from Harvard, and a significant number are Acton residents.
A new musical language
“This is vibrant music of recent times,” said HPM Director Mark Bennett, “that introduces a new musical ‘language’ to vocal music. It is a language that speaks directly to the heart.” Two works, “Lux Aeterna” (Eternal Light) by Morten Lauridsen and “Triptych” by 35 -year-old British composer Tarik O’Regan, were written in the past 15 and eight years, respectively. Both works use techniques foreshadowed in Benjamin Britten’s music over 70 years ago, especially his unusual “Rejoice in the Lamb,” which the group will also perform.”
INTO THE LIGHT
Saturday, May 4 • 7:30 p.m.
St. Matthew’s United Methodist Church
435 Central Street, Acton
Lauridsen composed Lux Aeterna in response to his mother’s final illness, he wrote, finding “great personal comfort and solace in setting to music these timeless and wondrous words about Light, a universal symbol of illumination at all levels—spiritual, artistic, and intellectual.” Lauridsen received the National Medal of Arts in 2007.
All three selections are concerned with innocence, loss, hope, and reassurance, according to Bennett; they incorporate modern and ancient poetry, verses from the Old and New Testaments, and texts from Middle Eastern, Asian, and Medieval Latin sources. Though these works use many techniques from earlier musical eras—Renaissance, Baroque, and classical—their musical language achieves its effects by creating new chords that incorporate tones and overtones beyond what singers and audiences are accustomed to hearing in traditional music.
Havard singers among soloists
“Not only can you hear the subtle overtones somewhere in the sound—they suddenly make the chords come alive,” says Bennett. These “stacked-up” chords . . . “create a different kind of energy that affects your emotions strongly, in ways you don’t directly understand.”
Betsy Burr of West Bare Hill Road, who joined Harvard Pro Musica only three years ago after a 30-year hiatus from performing, as well as Bonnie Chandler of Prospect Hill Road, are both soloists in the final section of “Triptych.” Of her solo, Burr says, “My mother is always with me, never more so than when I am singing “As We Remember Them.” The text is a now-familiar poem written for the memorial service at Iwo Jima by the U.S. Marine chaplain Rabbi Roland Gittelsohn.
Chandler and Joanne Karohl of nearby Madigan Lane, are both frequent soloists with Harvard Pro Musica. Bonnie has been with the group for 20 years and has been singing “since I was little,” she says. “My father trained as a classical pianist, so our family always sang parts in the car wherever we went. Every time I sing this [solo], I think of the people I have loved who have died.”
Karohl was primarily an instrumentalist until she joined the group five years ago. Her solo, from “Rejoice in the Lamb,” presents the “voice” of a mouse who is a spiritual hero in text from a visionary 18th-century poet. “It’s a quirky and amusing piece (within the larger work) and really fun to sing,” she says.
Harvard Pro Musica includes members from high school age to retirees and will mark its 45th anniversary with musical celebrations in 2014-15.
Of this concert’s relevance to recent events in Boston, Hewett says, “The events of the past three weeks have brought me a complicated mix of feelings: sadness, anger, compassion, confusion. This music reflects all those issues and yet it also offers an emotional experience that is hopeful. It gives us a way to offer some of that hopefulness to our friends and neighbors through music.”
