Review: Spiritus Chamber Choir rises to challenge of Ice and Fire

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It was a with a mixture of confidence and pride that the president of the Spiritus Chamber Choir introduced Sunday afternoon’s concert at Mount Royal Conservatory’s Bella Concert Hall, a program entitled Ice and Fire.

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Over the course of its existence, the choir has grown in strength and quality and is now able to present a challenging program of modern choral works, including a world premiere of a new work by a young Canadian composer, one with Calgary connections. That an amateur choir could offer a credibly performed concert of music of this difficulty, given the restraints of rehearsal time and that the singers are all amateurs, is a remarkable accomplishment and one to be celebrated.

The program’s title, Ice and Fire, was drawn from a work of the same name by Imant Raminsh, the only composer on the program likely to be familiar to attendee of a choral concert. Raminsh’s work provided the centre of the sound world of the first half of the concert, one devoted to nature-based images, in a modern vein, in which the writing is largely chordal, and the interest of the music lies in the intersection of declamation and harmony.

This is a style of writing that developed, mostly in a university context, in The United States, deriving perhaps from Randall Thompson. As a style, it is now a modern North American lingua franca of choral writing. Essentially, all of the works, notably including Jeffrey Ryan’s excellent Valediction, were in this style, and with the secure tuning and admirable balance in the vocal forces, these works all had a strong and positive impact in performance.

In Raminish’s Ice and Fire, the performance was considerably helped by the fine solo singing of Joanna Henry, whose clear, expressive voice provided an attractive obligato to the choral underpinning. But the other soloists were fine too: Kathleen Warke in Esenwalds’ Northern Lights; Keegan Jane, Paul Newman, and Jamie Bertranm, in James Gordon’s Frobisher Baym; and Mar James and Jasper Buys in Esenvalds’ Rivers of Light.

The world premiere was The Ice Seasons by Carmen Braden, a choral piece with strings composed as her graduation piece from The University of Calgary. As a concept, Braden, engaged the images of Canada’s north and, especially, the making and breaking up of the ice in The Great Slave Lake (She is originally from Yellowknife). Employing tapes of sounds from the lake itself, and drawing upon poems by herself and other poems with lake images, Braden attempted to portray the emotions the lake evoked in her during these transitions in arctic weather.

The music itself contained many effects and short musical ideas, the harmonic language evoking a constant sense of unease and disquiet—an atmosphere that mixed wonder and apprehension. This was further emphasized by the string commentary, which had, musically speaking, not much connection to the vocal writing and provided an objective background to the choral writing. In general, the intellectual element in all this was more to the fore than the musical impact of the score itself, which remained largely the same in aphoristic style throughout.

The choir had clearly prepared the work with care, and conductor Timothy Shantz led the combined forces with competence and a full understanding of the challenges involved. It was impressive to hear such a solid performance of a work that, for the choir at least, contained a great many challenges.

The final part of the program included four works of a light, madrigal texture of which Marten Lauridsen’s Amor, l Sento L’Alma and Zachary Wadsworth’s Spring is Here were both the strongest works and the best sung. Lauridsen’s choral writing always impresses; but to hear the confidence in Wadsworth’s work, a composer 40 years younger than Lauridsen, was to be impressed again by his imagination and full understanding of how to write music that truly “sounds” for a choir.

In all this was a program to challenge the ears of its audience, and also to challenge the capacities of the choir. The long, tremendously difficult program clearly stretched the choir to its limits. But attempting such a challenge is a bit like putting money in an RRSP: there are dividends down the road.