Choral Arts Society's Eric Whitacre concert

Matthew Glandorf took a chance when he devoted an entire Choral Arts Society program to the work of one living composer— and a composer who’s under 40, at that. Eric Whitacre has become America’s most performed living choral composer, but that doesn’t necessarily mean choral audiences want to spend a whole concert listening to his work.

Whitacre occasionally succumbs to one of the most common faults of contemporary vocal composers: He sometimes throws in sudden outbursts and vocal leaps in places where they clash with the words, as if he felt the audience needed a little musical variety even if the text didn’t call for it. But overall the concert was another example of the intelligent adventurousness that Glandorf has brought to the Choral Arts Society’s programming.

The program opened with an irresistible display of straightforward, smoothly harmonious choral writing studded with creative bits like a long, wordless high note held under the rest of the chorus. The text was a beautiful poem by e.e. cummings entitled i thank You God for most this amazing day— one of the few times cummings felt compelled to use a capital letter, as Glandorf pointed out in his comments.

A vision of a dream

Glandorf ran the program with no intermission and no breaks for applause because he had arranged the individual items around a vision of a dream and he didn’t want to break the mood. The Cummings was immediately followed by a winning piano melody that was taken up by a solo violin as the chorus eased into a group of five Hebrew love songs.

Whitacre composed those songs in response to a 1996 request for a set of “troubadour songs.” For the texts, he asked his future wife, Hila Pitman, for five poems in her native language. The songs Whitacre produced were all shaped by the great tradition of dark Hebrew melody. The third song replicates the tolling of bells with an effective touch of aleatoric writing— a technique in which the composer lets chance or the performers’ impulses determine some of the final form. The finale begins with the violin suggesting Middle Eastern instruments as the chorus launches into a swaying, very Hebraic setting. The text of the final poem begins

He was full of tenderness.
She was very hard.

and continues the role reversal:

And as much as she tried to stay thus,
Simply and with no good reason,
He took her into himself,
And set her down in the softest, softest place.

The love story had a happy ending. Eight years later, to mark their seventh anniversary, Whitacre composed the next item on the program: a simple, serene setting of a marital blessing by a medieval Sufi mystic, Jalal al-Din Rumi.

From Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks

The heart of the dream motif was Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine, with a text by a choral singer-poet, Charles Anthony Silvestri, that incorporates Latin quotes from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The opening was a good example of a setting that jumped around without much regard for the text— though Whitacre may have been portraying the confusion of the dream state. Leonardo sounded melodramatic and overdone in parts of the other sections. But the complex, airily textured ending evoked a fantasy of personal flight that was worth waiting for.

When David Heard showed the composer has guts. David’s lament for his son Absalom has received some of the greatest settings in musical history. Whitacre met the challenge with an artful, moving setting that made heavy use of speech rhythms. It was followed by a piece about water and night, and the concert ended with a big finish, complete with clapping, percussion and silvery cowbells, built around a Spanish text that charts the passage from drought to cloudburst.

When the applause faded, Glandorf finished the afternoon with an encore guaranteed to raise three good laughs: Whitacre’s settings of three of Ogden Nash’s short poems about animals. In spite of a lapse here and there, Whitacre is obviously a talented, creative composer blessed with a happy ability to pick texts that are so good, the words alone could carry many of his pieces.