Singing Up a Storm

RJB’s remarks

As performers and lovers of music, we can never predict how real-world events will shape the music we perform and the music we hear. As much as music helps us transcend our here and now, there are certain times when it’s impossible to perform in a vacuum and ignore the way the music resonates with life, echoing and amplifying the joys and struggles our world presents. That’s the agony and the ecstasy of live music.

In my first season working with Monmouth Civic Chorus, Hurricane Sandy devastated this community. In March of 2020, the world dimmed in the darkness of fear and uncertainty. As the weeks wore on, the gravity of the situation intensified: lives, lost; ways of life, upended; living, together, suspended, as social contact was restricted to the remote and the digital. The grief, hardship, and isolation sharpened in the face of so many unanswerable questions: Would the spread of illness abate? What should we be doing, or not doing? When—if ever—would our lives return to some kind of normalcy? Would live music performance ever be possible again? That spring, many feared it would be years before we returned to the concert hall.

I turned to music, naturally, to assuage my anxiety, echo my frustration, and provide a ray of hope on the horizon. I listened to Handel’s Dixit Dominus and Haydn’s Mass in a Time of Distress (Lord Nelson Mass) many times that spring. Their ardent, athletic opening movements, in stormy minor keys struck a chord. And their complex, dizzying fugues reminded me how satisfying it is to get dozens of musicians to dance around each other successfully.

Three years on, we’re back in the concert hall, more grateful than ever for the opportunity to make music, still trying to revive cherished ways of life, hopefully imagining a bright future. And yet, just a year ago, we began our March concert with a moment’s pause for the Ukrainian people, newly embroiled in conflict. Today, hearing the stormy sounds of 300- and 200-year-old pieces reconnects us to the reality that struggle and sorrow suffuse human history. Sound itself can’t eradicate disease or end war. But sound can soothe, and the act of immersing ourselves in the music and poetry of others’ imaginations can open our minds and hearts, enkindle empathy, and reorient us toward hope.

Both halves of today’s concert move from pain to peace and reassurance. The more I engage with this music, the more amazed I am by the resilience of the human spirit and by the capacity of music—especially choral music, created by gatherings of human bodies breathing, being, together—to reflect and transform that spirit into song. Your presence here today signals your willingness to enfold yourself in a shared moment of musical community and plays a part in reminding us that, together, we can weather any storm.

Notes on the program

— Ryan James Brandau

Dixit Dominus

Handel’s Dixit Dominus provides a snapshot of his output during the formative years he spent in Italy, 1706-1710. Though he was just a young twenty-something, all the musical traits that characterize his mature music were already in evidence.

Upon his arrival in Italy, he quickly made a favorable impression on a number of patrons and hosts, namely cardinals. Despite his Protestant upbringing, Handel’s first compositions in Italy were written for the Catholic Church, including his expansive setting of Dixit Dominus. Clement XI’s Papal decree banning opera seria in Rome forced composers there to channel their dramatic leanings into un-staged genres.

With a ready supply of star opera singers available for performance, solo vocal cantatas and other vocal music flourished. Tempting as it may be to consider Handel’s vocal cantatas and Dixit Dominus as workshop pieces—warm-ups for the later dramatic arias in his operas—in fact they distill the drama of a longer operatic arc into a few movements of concentrated emotion.

Handel’s choral works—some twenty-five oratorios, Coronation Anthems, the Chandos Anthems, and a number of sacred works—maintain interest through a rich display of varied choral textures: massive block-chord declamations, frenzied cascades of scales scattering vocal energies in all directions, carefully constructed fugue subjects tightly woven together, and deft combinations of all of these and other procedures.

All are in evidence in the 1707 setting of the Vespers psalm Dixit Dominus. The powerful, violent images of the psalm seemed to have inspired Handel’s young, fecund imagination (perhaps in an effort to impress a patron) and left him unafraid of marshaling his forces in a variety of challenging ways. One can’t help but marvel when a human voice or violin meets the demands of Handel’s daredevil writing. In Dixit, Handel was testing the limits of the human larynx.

In the first movement, Handel swaps the long-tone chorale tune presentation typical of Lutheran church music for a Latin psalm-tune cantus firmus and embeds it in a typically Italianate texture, churning with a driving bass and dizzyingly active passagework in the upper strings. In the sixth movement, he layers Renaissance-like dissonant suspensions in the chorus atop a relentless onslaught of eighth notes played by all the strings in unison. The sixth movement ends with menacingly choppy quarter notes depicting the shattering of skulls.

At the beginning of the seventh, the bass instruments and choir disappear, the brisk pulse melts into a gentle adagio, and Handel unspools a heartrendingly beautiful duet for two sopranos. In the last movement, extremes of range, enormous leaps, and angular vocal lines combine in a fugal tour de force for the choir. The variety throughout is remarkable.

The Cry of Jeremiah

Composer, vocalist, and educator Rosephanye Powell, based at Auburn University, has created many works for solo vocalists and choral ensembles around the globe. Her first major work for chorus and orchestra, The Cry of Jeremiah, was commissioned by the American Guild of Organists in 2012.

The first two movements capture in music the toggling anger and abandonment felt so acutely by its titular prophet. As Handel and Haydn do, Powell looks to energetic arpeggios in the minor mode and chromaticism that recalls Verdi’s Dies Irae to convey Jeremiah’s outcries.

The haunting second movement introduces a broad, beautiful melody tinged with the melancholy of the blues. The intensity of those movements and their mix of rage and resignation is matched by the strength and resolve of the exuberant gospel-inspired Hallelujah that closes the work. Here, Jeremiah stands strong in his conviction of deliverance, heralding God as a “refuge,” and a “strong mighty tower” with whom he can withstand all storms.

Missa in Angustiis

In 1798, with the Napoleonic Wars more intense than ever, Haydn penned his only mass in a minor key, the Missa in Angustiis (“Mass in a Time of Distress”.) From the very first notes—a slashing descending D-minor arpeggio, Haydn conjures a powerful sense of urgency. In his original scoring, which you will hear today, Haydn eschews the wind instruments of the orchestra altogether, leaving the strings with just an organ, three trumpets, and timpani. The stark contrast in timbres sharpens the martial blare and beat of the brass and drums.

The pointed trumpet fanfares and pleading sighs of the chorus in the opening Kyrie, and the almost menacing advance of the trumpets and timpani in the Benedictus, were as severe as any music written up to that time, and, hauntingly, surely, echoed the sounds of battlefields. Against these foreboding sounds, contrasting passages convey assurance and joy with utmost effervescence. Haydn leans on the strings not just for fiery, surging passagework, but also for sweet, supple lyricism.

Haydn manipulates the musical texture to pit part versus the whole, the individual versus the community. The famously acrobatic, impassioned soprano solo in the opening movement gives an individual voice to the predominant sense of anxiety, crying high above the storm of the strings and trumpets. The four sections of the chorus enter one on top of another, piling up dissonances through insistent repetitions of the plea “Have mercy on us.”

Elsewhere, such as at the end of the Gloria and in the final Dona Nobis Pacem, Haydn uses fugues and fugal techniques, where one musical idea is presented in each of the four voice parts, altered ever so slightly so that they overlap harmoniously, cooperatively.

In the first of the movements setting the Credo text (the mass’s group statement of belief) all voices sing the same music: the sopranos and tenors sing exactly the same line throughout, an octave apart; the altos and basses follow a measure behind and a fifth below. A single line of music, refracted through the laws of counterpoint and harmony, creates a sparkling, colorful whole. Out of one strong idea Haydn makes many. Later, in the midst of a fiery Et Resurrexit, he does the opposite, uniting the many vocal parts into one unison declaration.

A huge thanks to our donors

We are deeply grateful for the generous and continuous financial support we receive from our donors. These contributions allow us to organize and hold concerts like this one. Through the Scholarship Fund we have supported many young artists throughout the years.

Thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Virtuoso donors

Maestro ($500)

Janet & Pete Breslin
Joe Pisano & Steven Russell – in honor of MCC board members who have been wonderful to work with

Artist ($250)

Hillary & Sean Critelli
Anne & Daniel Ford
Kathleen Woolston

Soloist ($150)

Paul Chalifour & Jim Scavone
The Cope Family – in appreciation of our four soloists ($600)
Doug & Doris Clark – in memory of Bill Shoppell Jr.
Gerald and Susan Metz
C. Ondrak & R. Vendetti
Huiling & Gordon Wu

Musician ($125)

Anonymous – sponsoring a cello
Mary Batistick
Steve & Patti D’Andrea – sponsoring the piano
Victor Barbella — with gratitude for being part of the wonderful MCC
A friend
Susan Gorsky – sponsoring the organ
Smolka Tours – in honor of Doug Clark
Carol Van Kirk

Friend ($100)

A friend — in honor of Mary Batistick
A friend — in honor of Jim Scavone
Anonymous – in honor of  Joal Leen
Steve D’Andrea – in honor of Patti D’Andrea
Becky & Marshall Gorman
The Harbeck/Izzo family – in honor of Matt Izzo
Gwyneth Hecht
Marilyn Kelsey – in honor of Joanne Kelsey
Deborah & Dwight Macock – in memory of Bill R. Shoppell Jr.
Anthony Pisano – in honor of Joseph Pisano
Clare Resnick — in honor of a fellow alto
Janet Rostad – in memory of Tim Rostad
James A Schmitt – in honor of Peggy Noecker
Martie Viets — kudos to Christine Psolka, rehearsal leader extraordinaire
Gordon Wu – in honor of Gerald Metz
Samantha Wu – in honor of Huiling & Gordon Wu

Fan ($25)

Anonymous
Cynthia Bianchi – in memory of Hollis D. Bianchi
Steve & Patti D’Andrea
Stephan A Heinlein – in honor of Daniel Ford ($50)

Other

Mr. & Mrs. Thomas Hoffman – in support of Jeff Lamp ($50)

Acknowledgments

Thank you to Printing2Go for providing exceptional service at every turn. You make our season possible.