BRATTLEBORO — Susan Dedell celebrates her 25th year directing the Brattleboro Concert Choir with a special performance of a monumental choral work.
On Saturday, Jan. 10, at 7:30 p.m., and Sunday, Jan. 11, at 3 p.m., the 100-voice Brattleboro Concert Choir and a full symphony orchestra, all under Dedell's direction, will perform the Verdi Requiem at the Latchis Theatre.
Joining Dedell will be a quartet of emerging artists as vocal soloists: soprano Amanda Grooms, mezzo-soprano Jazimina MacNeil, tenor Hugo Vera, and baritone Mark Womack.
Dedell says she is excited to present these soloists, all of whom are relatively young and beginning significant careers in opera.
These “extremely fine musicians,” as she calls them, have been awarded positions at the Tanglewood and Marlboro music festivals and have appeared with the Boston Lyric Opera, the Metropolitan Opera in New York, and the Chicago Lyric Opera.
“Over the years, I keep my ears open for exciting new singers, and I often find them when I am performing away from Brattleboro,” Dedell says. “The Verdi Requiem stands in a class of its own in the world of choral music: huge yet personal; terrifying yet affirming.”
Dedell says she believes that few pieces combine such stunning vocal drama and magnificent symphonic writing.
“Verdi's dramatic gifts are on full display in this work from the crushing hammer blows of the bass drum and orchestra in the 'Dies Irae' to the 'Lacrymosa' that palpably weeps, to the uplifting 'Lux Aeterna' scored magically for three flutes and soprano,” she writes in a press release.
Dedell has been artistic director of the Brattleboro Concert Choir since 1990. The Choir, created by Blanche Moyse in 1950 as the Community Chorus, was the premier program of the Brattleboro Music Center.
The name change to Brattleboro Concert Choir fittingly reflects its growth in skill and musicianship. It has employed only three artistic directors during its lifetime: Moyse, Catherine Stockman, and Dedell.
Dedell is also director of chorus at Marlboro College; founder and director of the Vermont Repertory Singers, Winged Voices, The Jubilee Girls Choir, and the Bach Festival Children's Chorus; and enjoys an active concert and recital schedule as a pianist.
She has been director of music at St. Michael's Episcopal Church in Brattleboro since 1992. Dedell has also directed a variety of opera, oratorio, and musical theater productions.
Scary and complex
“The Verdi Requiem has some the scariest writing I have ever heard as well as some of most self-compassionate,” Dedell says. “This work concerns big issues, life and death, as it considers a lot we don't fully know or understand. An emotionally visceral work, the Verdi Requiem has an exuberant quality as it explores complex stuff.”
But this does not necessarily make it a sacred piece of music.
“Is the Verdi Requiem one of the great religious works of Western art, or is it an opera in disguise?” Dedell asks. “The best answer may be the simplest: It is a work that deals honestly and bravely with the religious ideas in the text.”
But Dedell adds this qualification: “The Verdi Requiem may have a Church text, but by no means is it a Church composition.”
Verdi was an agnostic who was hostile to the institution of the Church.
“Indeed, how could Verdi, an artistic and moral giant, have squared the writing of a religious work with his confirmed agnosticism?” Dedell writes in the program notes.
“Already as a child in Busseto, Italy, he had developed that hatred for the clergy. As a man rigorously honest in all matters, Verdi could hardly have compromised the sincerely held beliefs of a lifetime. Rather, at the center of the composer's attention in all of his works were the fates of individual people.”
As Dedell tells The Commons, “The Requiem was performed at its premiere in a church but then never again during Verdi's life. Even now it is hardly ever performed in a church, but much more often in the concert hall or opera house.”
People have often described the Verdi Requiem as operatic - even too operatic for its subject - but unlike many, Dedell would not call the piece an opera either.
”It certainly uses the musical vocabulary of opera,” Dedell says, “but operas are based on an individual experience.” In opera, we are able to follow the specific drama of what happens to an Aida or to a Madame Butterfly or to a Barber of Seville.
“Oh, The Requiem tells a story all right, but it's everybody's story,” she says.
Dedell contends that Verdi was a radical, non-religious thinker who concerned himself not with theology but rather with psychological drama.
“Thus the Verdi Requiem is not about the dead: it is about the living,” Dedell writes in the program notes for the concert. “It does not dwell on the afterlife but [rather] probes the hopes and fears of those contemplating the meaning of life and death. Although using the standard Catholic Requiem Mass text, it does not preach the doctrines of the Church but rather allows us to probe human emotions in the face of death.”
The Requiem “blazes with vision and power,” as it speaks to a more human condition than a heavenly one. “This drama is the drama of life, with all its strivings, tragedies, and triumphs,” Dedell says.
“The huge appeal of Verdi's music springs from his ability to delve deep into human psychology and reach each person's heart,” she adds.
Dedell says she believes that music is the perfect medium for a piece about human psychology: “Music can take on things that are hard to talk about. It makes vivid things that we fail to put into words.”
The Verdi Requiem may pose the humanistic question, “How do we feel about dying?” But it is concerned not with afterlife but rather with how the living considers this dilemma.
Dedell says, “If this Requiem considers what happens at the final judgement it never resolves judgement. The Verdi Requiem is about man in the here and now.”
Dedell writes that “despite the fury and terror of many passages, the cathartic and ennobling experience of this truly extraordinary music leaves us ready to stride out once again into the light of day with renewed confidence in the ability of man to face both the light and the shadow: not to cower before immensities but to go into both life and death with open eyes.”