BRATTLEBORO — For her last few public performances with the Brattleboro Music Center's Concert Choir at the Latchis Theatre, Music Director Susan Dedell will showcase a new work and a familiar favorite.
On Jan. 20 and 21, BMC presents Having Seen the Moon, which includes Karl Jenkins' Requiem and Morten Lauridsen's Lux Aeterna.
In selecting these works, Dedell continues to explore new music and contemporary composers at the same time as she revisits works that she has found particularly profound in the past.
The concert promises to be an eclectic mix, for it includes, as Dedell puts it, “Jenkins and Lauridsen, Shakuhachi, harp, percussion, Japanese influence, a bit of hip-hop thrown into the subtle background on Jenkins, and the incomparable Morten Lauridsen, who I think is one of the eternal greats.”
Dedell will retire from leading the chorus this year, and this will be the next-to-last Concert Choir concert she directs, and the last one she directs at the Latchis.
“The moment feels significant,” Dedell told The Commons. “We had our first program at the Latchis about 10 to 12 years ago, and so we have had a long collaboration with the space. We are always happy to perform there. The venue has always been very welcoming for us. And it has its best feature of all: It's central to downtown Brattleboro.”
Something new
At the culmination of 29 years of visionary programming and compelling performances, Dedell has chosen this occasion to introduce the Choir and the community to Jenkins' highly acclaimed Requiem.
“In the last several years, I have felt the need to introduce new works to the community through the Concert Choir,” Dedell said. “I feel compelled to keep pressing the point that we are not done with excellence in creativity.”
Joining the Concert Choir for this performance are soprano Junko Watanabe and Elizabeth Brown, a celebrated shakuhachi player. The shakuhachi is the traditional flute of Japan, a long, bamboo instrument that originated in the sixth century, when it was widely used by the Fuke sect of Zen monks in the practice of “blowing meditation.”
Brown combines a composing career with a diverse performing life. She began studying shakuhachi in 1984 while on a concert tour in Japan. A grand prize winner in the Makino Yutaka Composition Competition for Japanese traditional instrument orchestra, she was also a prizewinner in the Senzoku Gakuen Shakuhachi Composition Competition.
Watanabe, first known locally as a participant at the Marlboro Music Festival, has been a soloist with the Boston Lyric Opera, Boston Classical Orchestra, Masterworks Choral, and the New England Bach Festival. Born and raised in Osaka, Japan, she holds master of music degrees from both Osaka College of Music and the Longy School of Music.
“Junko's lyrical and expressive voice is the perfect vehicle for the haiku texts in Jenkins' Requiem, and I look forward to the magic that will be created between her voice and the shakuhachi,” Dedell writes in a press release.
For the Pie Jesu in Jenkins' Requiem, the Concert Choir will be joined by treble soloists Marian Wojcik and Nathaniel Johnson, both members of The Choir School. Marian is a sixth-grader at Hilltop Montessori School, and she also is a piano student at the BMC. Nathaniel is a fifth-grader at Academy School, where he also plays the trumpet.
Also on the program will be Lauridsen's “Lux Aeterna.” Dedell contends that “this incredible composition is considered by many to be the greatest choral accomplishment of the last 100 years.”
Looking back
As she considers her tenure with the BMC Concert Choir, Dedell writes “These shared moments of music with community members and chorus are precious beyond description. This is also a time when singing together is increasingly treasured as the great gift that it is.
“So, let the music sing on and on and on! And bring us comfort, elation, introspection, energy, and the ability to be ever closer to one another. What an incredible way we have for making music in beautiful Vermont."
Dedell spent three weeks in Sicily last summer.
“Sicily is a place I desired to go for a long time,” she says. “I expected to have great wine and food, which indeed did happen. What I had not expected was the sensation of 'Wow!'”
Hers was an equivocal wow, however.
“Majestic landscapes filled with trash, Sicily combines incredible beauty with great poverty,” Dedell continues. “I speak a little Italian, so I could make my way into the culture. The people were warm and friendly, but I sometimes got the impression that many did not want me there. Often I found myself asking myself, why am I here? I guess these are the lessons I have come back to Vermont to consider.”
Dedell thinks we are fortunate to be living in a golden age of choral writing, and the Lauridsen piece certainly plays a central role in this renaissance of choral composition.
“Lauridsen is at present considered to be the brightest star in the American choral firmament and rightly so,” Dedell writes. “He is able to create elegantly-finished works of art that radiate with the glow of what is truly right and inevitable. His unmistakable sound is an amazing balance between the contemporary and the timeless. The 'Lux Aeterna' is simply one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written, gracious and exciting for both chorus and orchestra.”
In the program notes for Having Seen the Moon, Dedell writes “I feel rather passionately about performing current works, not because I think it is an academic kind of obligation, but because I think it is truly joyful to realize that creativity and beauty have no boundaries or limitations by age or era. We have no need to worry that great music will cease to be created, performed, and enjoyed - because the human desire to communicate is absolutely fundamental. ”
A case in point is the Jenkins Requiem, which she says is a wonderful piece that “weaves five Japanese haiku memorials into the Requiem Mass in a transporting work that creatively reaches across cultures.”
An exalted celebration
Combining warm Western harmonies and melodies with the purity of Japanese songs, the Requiem, according to the prestigious journal Music Week is “the ultimate in postmodern Requiems” and “a deeply moving and exalted celebration of the cycle of life.”
“Jenkins is known for mixing up different genres of music,” Dedell writes. “Area crowds may remember the wonderful performance of his by the Brattleboro Women's Chorus. He continues in that mode in this piece, as he uses percussion and rhythm to contrast with the more ethereal qualities of the music. [He] is one of those composers who understand the importance of making a connection with the audience. Its impact is immediate and lingering.”
Dedell believes Jenkins is currently very popular because his work has crossed over into other genres of music beyond the purely classical.
“His special stamp is to mix many types of music from world, ethnic, jazz, and classical,” she says. “In this Requiem, he employs an Eastern tradition of music. The result is an exciting sound that strikes me as genuinely Japanese.
“What I know about the culture is through our soprano soloist, Junko Watanabe, who is originally from Japan. Through my friendship with Junko, I feel I have been able to put my toe in the world of Japan.
“An ancient culture, Japan had remained isolated for many centuries, which led to a very distinctive aesthetic. Jenkins' music has a spareness of sound that strikes me as very Japanese. For the five movements when he sets haikus, those short Japanese poems about nature, he uses the Japanese tradition quite well, without ever seeming derivative.”
The shakuhachi, the traditional flute of Japan, is used only on those five movements, and then simply with strings and a harp.
“We have brought in a fantastic harpist from New York City to play with us on this work,” Dedell says. “The Jenkins piece relies heavily on Japanese percussion. I don't want to give the impression that by percussion I mean heavy drumming. Here it is used in a more subtle ways, with percussion instruments like bamboo and wind chimes. They provide a cool contrast to the string parts in the same movements.
“But the work is by no means completely Japanese. In fact, I even hear a bit of hip-hop music embedded in one chorus. But that may be just me. When I told my discovery to the Chorus, no one seemed to know what I was talking about. I guess audiences will have to find out if I am right for themselves.”