Program Note Extractions written by Victoria Looseleaf, and Tom May

Program notes for Bruckner motets (by Tom May):

We don’t tend to think of Anton Bruckner as a miniaturist, but some of his most persuasive music can be found in his motets, or short choral pieces to sacred texts. As do his mighty symphonies, these compositions lift us from an ordinary sense of time by building—albeit with far simpler means—a sense of reverberant spaciousness, of sanctuary beyond the horizon. In fact, both motets that we hear, written for four-part unaccompanied chorus, were intended for specific churches.

Locus iste, from 1869, is an invocation for a new cathedral and calculates stirring silences into its elegantly transparent harmonies. In Os justi, which comes from a decade later, Bruckner restricts himself to ultra-simple harmonies in the archaic Lydian mode (F to F on the piano’s white keys) but expresses an emotional terrain as vast in its own way as that found in his symphonies, from sublimely assured counterpoint to a capping stone of unornamented plainchant.

Program notes for C’est la petit’ fill’ du prince by Poulenc (by Tom May):

The tweakings of actual original folk tunes characterizing Francis Poulenc’s Chansons Françaises are as subtle as those nuances of a brushstroke that can nevertheless be used to identify an artist’s signature. Poulenc likened himself to the double-headed Janus on account of his notoriously contradictory—or, to see it in a different light, comprehensive—personality. He rose to fame as an insouciant bon vivant in the sparkle of 1920s Paris, wagging on about his confessed taste for “adorable bad music.” One peer described him as a musical “hooligan.” But a powerful conversion experience in 1936 led Poulenc back to the Catholic faith of his heritage, resulting in one of the most glorious outpourings of sacred choral music of the past century.

Poulenc, however, hardly forswore his elegant, dapper charm. France’s liberation from the Nazis—the composer had spent the dark war years in Paris—inspired the desire to celebrate with this collection of buoyant folk songs, which Poulenc arranged for a cappella chorus in 1945 and 1946. The eight Chansons Françaises are also arranged to complement each other in mood and style and, in the process, bring out both the frivolous and meditative sides of Poulenc’s disposition.

The resourceful sauciness of the pretty “Margoton” and the defiance of the bride (“Pilons l’orge”) are set against the lusty men in “Clic, clac, dansez sabots,” in which a simple repetitive figure gives a pretty clear image of their one-track minds. A hint of medieval nostalgia meanwhile occasionally graces the songs’ robustly secular scenarios (the opening of No. 7, for example). But the set’s center of gravity is the austerely beautiful “C’est la petite fill’ du prince.” Here Poulenc’s uncomplicated devices of countermelody and choral dialogue between the men and women enhance the sweet melancholy associated with falling in love by folk song of whatever national flavor.

Program Notes for Fernandes’ Dame Albriçia mano Anton (by Victoria Looseleaf)

Dame Albriçia mano Anton was composed by Gaspar Fernandes (1570-1629). Its exhilarating rhythmic accents inject this piece with ebullient brio.

Program Notes for “Lift Thine Eyes” from Mendelssohn's Elijah

In the middle of the 2nd part of Mendelssohn’s Elijah, the prophet experiences a ‘dark night of the soul’. In his famous aria “It Is Enough”, Elijah seems to have lost all hope for mankind. Suddenly the voices of angels are heard, singing “Lift thine eyes to the mountains whence cometh help”. This transformative moment in the Oratorio is the only purely acappella movement in the entire piece. The radiant sound of women’s voices singing in burnished D major glory is enough to revive Elijah’s spirits, as he then continues on his long journey.

Program notes for Rachmaninoff The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom (by Tom May):

While Rachmaninoff was first touring the United States as a composer-pianist in the winter of 1909, he suffered a tremendous bout of homesickness—a foretaste of the pain he would face as a permanent exile from his native Russia following the 1917 Revolution. Could this be why he felt such an urge to reconnect with his roots upon returning in 1910 to his beloved estate at Ivanovka (a few hundred miles southeast of Moscow)? The composer would later recall its vistas as oceanic in scope, “where the waves are endless fields of wheat, rye, and oats, stretching as far as the eye can see.”

Prompted by these surroundings, Rachmaninoff quickly and with great pleasure set to work on The Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom. Commentators like to speculate on the ambiguity of his religious disposition—Rachmaninoff wasn’t conventionally pious and in fact had side-stepped the Russian Orthodox Church’s strictures to marry his cousin—yet he convincingly taps into the most transfixing elements of a sacred tradition in this visionary, ecstatic music. In part he was no doubt also recovering persistent memories of the church visits he made as a boy in the company of his grandmother. The piano may be the instrument that first comes to mind at the mention of Rachmaninoff, but the sounds of chant and tolling bells lodged in his imagination and are equally recurring features (think of the chant-like melody that unspools at the beginning of the Third Piano Concerto, the notorious “Rach 3” featured in the film Shine).

The Liturgy in question is the one most typically used for the central worship ritual in the Eastern Orthodox Church (as opposed to those reserved for special feast days), with its hymns and prayers set to music for unaccompanied choir. It was named in honor of an early church father known for his stern reforms and his eloquence: “Chrysostom” is from the Greek for “golden-mouthed,” which also happens to be a fitting epithet for the glorious choral tradition, developed over centuries, that Rachmaninoff evokes. In 1878 Tchaikovsky paved the way for the later revival of interest in this tradition by other composers when, in a controversial move, he composed his own setting of the Liturgy intended for both ecclesiastical and secular performance. We’re familiar from operatic history with the tug of war between music and words, but it has deeper roots, in the need perceived by church authorities (both Eastern and Western) to regulate the role of music. Tchaikovsky’s was considered too distracting and was thus rejected for actual liturgical use; Rachmaninoff’s composition met with the same verdict. Although his hold-out romanticism got him a reputation as a conservative, what the Orthodox Church objected to, ironically enough, was Rachmaninoff’s “modernist” expression.

For contemporary audiences, however, the wonder of this music is its timelessness. Rachmaninoff adapted varieties of actual archaic chant for a large portion of his later and better-known sacred choral work, the All-Night Vigil. The Chrysostom Liturgy, by contrast, involves newly composed music that ingeniously mimics the contemplative atmosphere of the original. In this concert performance we hear a distillation of the lengthy, 20-section service. For all the outwardly austere restrictions of the medium, Rachmaninoff elicits a prismatic textural spectrum from his painterly combination of voices. Listen throughout to how he makes the music breathe in both smaller units and larger waves of shifting dynamics: the buildup of expectation of the godhead, for example, in “Come, Let Us Worship,” followed by a gentle dimming on “Alleluia.” The direction of the musical line continually glosses the words, as in the gradual descent to encompass the entire choir as a mirror of the angels in the “Cherubic Hymn.”

Rachmaninoff reserves his most otherworldly music for “We Hymn Thee,” which occurs near the transforming moment of the consecration, as a soprano solo emerges from a barely audible stasis generated by the chorus. Yet the earthy, direct charms of folk music are also absorbed into this idiom, as we hear in the bell-imitating echo effects of “Praise the Lord from the Heavens.” Rachmaninoff steels us to reenter the world with the vigorous, ringing proclamations of worship concluding the Liturgy.

Program notes for Tormis' Tamme raiuja (by Tom May):

A towering figure in contemporary choral music, Veljo Tormis mirrors Bartók’s patient dedication to preserving the artistic beauty and wisdom of folk song traditions—a task whose urgency has intensified with the rapid homogenization of global culture. “I turned to our natural heritage,” observes the Estonian composer, “in order to discover my mother tongue.” But he also came to know a magnificent variety of independent but related folk music idioms in the region around the Baltic Sea, extending up to Finland.

A series of expeditions starting in 1969 introduced Tormis to smaller, little-known pockets of language, folklore, and music among the Baltic Finns. The fact that they were rapidly disappearing spurred him to undertake an in-depth study of their traditions. Over a two-decade period, Tormis collected and consulted, arranging what he found into the expansive song cycle Forgotten Peoples, which represents several of these ethnic groups. Karelian Destiny forms its own cycle within the larger one and is his tribute to the largest minority among the Baltic Finns, whose culture is rooted in the area, often fought over, that straddles Finland and Russia and has left a deep impression on Finnish identity.

Tormis’s arrangements of five songs for a cappella mixed chorus are neither literal transcriptions nor romanticized reworkings. They inhabit a space made alluringly resonant by the context in which Tormis places them, representing one face of what he calls “a pre-Christian, shamanistic civilization” that is “very close to nature from the ecological point of view.” The tragic, fate-directed sense pervading these songs is also no accident. Tormis sees “no reason to disagree” with the implicit analogy many have noted between their progression and the parts of the Requiem Mass (beginning with the Lacrimosa-like “The Weeping Maiden,” pivoting around “As a Serf in Viru” as a vengeful Dies Irae, and ending with the sadly resigned irony of “A Lullaby”). Yet rather than “sing a final requiem” to these peoples, the composer suggests that “their way of thinking and their values might even give some support to insecure contemporary man in his everyday rat-race.”

Program notes for Stucky motets (by Victoria Looseleaf):

Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Stucky, whose works range from large-scale orchestral compositions to solo piano pieces, has fashioned his austere Three New Motets for double choir, their varying tempi and dynamics voiced in rich chord clusters painting a serene, 10-minute portrait in memory of – and harkening back to -- Thomas Tallis. Spiritual, profound and intensely moving, all of these vocal works will linger long after their final notes fade, once again providing musical nourishment to hungry souls.

Program notes for Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium (by Tom May):

Regular followers of the Master Chorale hardly need any introduction to the transporting beauty of Morten Lauridsen’s choral music. In fact, it was through the works he produced while serving as composer in residence for the LAMC (between 1994 and 2001)—above all, this a cappella motet—that Lauridsen rapidly emerged as one of the pre-eminent living American composers in the contemporary choral scene. Just last year, his achievements were recognized with a National Medal of the Arts.

In the 14 years since the LAMC premiered it in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, O Magnum Mysterium has been performed thousands of times around the world. Board member Marshall Rutter originally commissioned the piece as a Christmas gift for his wife, Terry Knowles, LAMC’s current Executive Director. Lauridsen sets the familiar Latin text—a poem whose brief compass (a mere 23 words) conveys the sense of awe at the central paradox of the Christmas miracle: that the manifestation of the divine takes place not among the elite but is the privilege of the most humble to witness and cherish.

Lauridsen subdivides the text into several smaller sections but weaves these together seamlessly through repetitions and variants of the graceful melody of wonder we hear at the outset (to “magnum mysterium”). Radiant, this phrase pierces through the sustained, resonant harmonies that bank like clouds around it, gradually swelling in volume and intensity within the section praising the “Blessed Virgin.” The music then gently tapers to the level at which it began, its texture now suggesting a new-found serenity while the chorus begins a peaceful coda on the word “Alleluia.” The basis for Lauridsen’s reputation as a musical mystic can be heard clearly here as he conveys, within a mere five minutes of mortal time and using the unadorned human voice alone, the actual experience of epiphany.

Program notes for Copland's At the River, Ching-A-Ring Chaw and Zion's Walls (by Tom May):

“Give me a book of tunes,” Aaron Copland once said, “and I’ll immediately know what tune attracts me and what one doesn’t.” As with so many folk-song compilations, the deceptively simple Old American Songs, which Copland published in two sets of five each, disguise the painstaking effort involved in gathering, choosing, and artfully arranging the wealth of possibilities that were available to him. One of Copland’s easily overlooked achievements here is to convey what biographer Howard Pollack calls “a diversified portrait of America itself, held together by the unity of Copland’s style.”

The songs in fact range far beyond what is normally thought of as actual folk tunes (of which “I Bought Me a Cat,” a popular encore number, is a delightful example from the subgenre of children’s songs). His selections center around the antebellum and Civil War era, when American identity was being tested and reforged. “The Boatmen’s Dance” and “Ching-a-Ring Chaw” actually come from minstrel shows (Copland changed the dialect of the original texts and even completely rewrote “Ching-a-Ring Chaw” –save for its chorus—since, as he explained, “I did not want to take any chance of it being construed as racist”). “Long Time Ago” comes from a once-popular love ballad; “At the River” and “Zion’s Walls” are examples of American religious song, the former from an 1865 gospel hymn tune (which was sung at the composer’s memorial concert) and the latter a tent-revival spiritual that Copland also used in his opera The Tender Land.

Copland composed the first set of Old American Songs in 1950 and, encouraged by its success, the second in 1952, setting them for solo voice and piano. Irving Fine later made choral arrangements (with both piano and orchestral accompaniment). Copland cleverly uses the piano to evoke atmospheres specific to the widely varying songs, with strumming banjo for the minstrel songs and nobly spaced chords for “At the River”—all reinforcing this rich mix of vernaculars that also inspired Copland in the creation of his “American sound.”

Program notes for Wana Baraka arranged by Shawn Kirchner (from the printed score):

Wana Baraka is a popular Kenyan religious song. The arranger, Shawn Kirchner (a tenor in the Los Angeles Master Chorale), learned the song through a delegation of Kenyans who participated in the 1994 Agricultural Missions International Consultation in Sogakope, Ghana.