Boys Choir of Harlem
People who attend Boys Choir of Harlem concerts come as much for the choir itself as for its performance, since both are a source of inspiration. Founded in 1968 by Walter J. Turnbull, who still serves as the choir's artistic director, the Boys Choir of Harlem has a dual mission: teaching at-risk kids about discipline and perseverance through teaching them to make music. (It's the rare choir whose conductor proudly cites the graduation rate of its members between works.) So the program the choir presented Sunday at the Music Center at Strathmore was designed not with a specific musical purpose in mind, but to showcase all the different things the choir can do.
A performance of Handel's coronation anthem "Zadok the Priest" was choppy and oddly zestless, but Canadian composer Srul Irving Glick's multilingual "Sing Unto the Lord a New Song" drew some dreamily ambiguous harmonies from the choristers. (Texts and translations, which were not provided for the concert, would have been particularly helpful here.) When the choir began a set of spirituals with stirring calls in Stacy Gibbs's "Witness," though, one sensed that it had found its home turf; subsequent spirituals arranged by Moses G. Hogan, including a medley in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., drew clear, bright tones and impassioned singing from the choir.
Before intermission, Turnbull told the audience, "We do everything." The choir proved it in the program's second half with a breathlessly choreographed series of Broadway and jazz numbers that led to more stationary but equally boisterous gospel singing. Here the sheer joy these young men took from performing was palpable, and it was a sight to see.
-- Andrew Lindemann Malone
New Dominion Chorale
The timing could hardly have been better for the New Dominion Chorale when it performed "Spring" from Haydn's "The Seasons" Sunday afternoon at Northern Virginia Community College's Schlesinger Hall. All outdoors seemed to echo the opening line, "Behold, the blustery winter flies," with warm breezes, cherry blossoms in bloom and long lines of tourist cars blocking roads.
Sharing the program with Haydn's salute to the season was Mendelssohn's Symphony No. 2, "Song of Praise," not quite a problem-free work but one that gave a good workout to the large amateur chorus, Artistic Director Thomas Beveridge and the 39-piece orchestra. This symphony starts out as a purely instrumental work, with three movements for the orchestra alone; then, in its last movement, it becomes a cantata using biblical texts except for one section, a chorale on "Now thank we all our God," with words by Martin Luther.
This chorale is musically the simplest and the strongest movement in the lengthy cantata. Bach used to end his cantatas with this kind of chorale, rightly because after such music has been heard there is not much that can be added. Mendelssohn chose to add two movements, not bad in themselves but anticlimactic in this work. In general, the work suffered (lightly, not fatally) from longueurs; it would have been more effective if it were 10 minutes shorter. A problem with Mendelssohn's music (though some people love it) is that it contains too much sunshine and not enough shadow. Tenor Daniel Snyder (the busiest and best of the four soloists) put some badly needed drama into the music with the aria "The sorrows of death." Of the other soloists, baritone James Shaffran handled arias and recitatives well, soprano Rebecca Littig sang some lovely top notes with fuzzy diction, and soprano Elizabeth Kluegel was excellent in a few numbers.
-- Joseph McLellan
Mark Crayton
While the great baroque composers of continental Europe (think Bach, Handel, Vivaldi or Lully) were grinding out Masses, oratorios, concertos and other big public works, across the Channel their English counterparts were perfecting the common song.
Composers such as John Blow, Henry Lawes, Maurice Greene and Henry Purcell may have spent their careers serving their kings in the Chapel Royal or their God at Westminster Cathedral, but their hearts were in the streets where ballads and bawdy lyrics reigned.
Countertenor Mark Crayton and his cohorts, harpsichordist James Janssen and cellist Laura Handler, brought a nice selection of English baroque songs and a couple of harpsichord pieces to the Phillips Collection on Sunday. The opening set of recitatives and arias by Johann Christoph Pepusch were excerpted from a cantata, but the rest were just songs -- songs of love or nature (or both), songs of welcome to the king and sacred songs -- and the only one that had any pretensions to grandeur was the Purcell anthem "Lord, What Is Man" with its extended recitative and ornate "Hallelujah." Most delightful was a chronicle of the agonies of uncertain love, "I Pass All My Hours" by Pelham Humphreys, in which a lover alternates between feeling that "there is no hell like loving too well" and that "there are no joys above the pleasures of love."
Crayton has a nice way with this kind of music. He is not at all an operatic sort of countertenor. He sounds comfortable in the range, handles the texts as if he cares about them and clearly understands this idiom. He sings accurately most of the time (although, in "Lord, What Is Man," he sounded a little overstretched), and he and the instrumentalists maintained an agreeable sense of ensemble. On his own, Janssen played a set of variations over a "ground" (a repeated bass figure) by G B Draghi and a Purcell Suite and Chaconne with carefully focused restraint.
-- Joan Reinthaler
