Choir team of 7 groups almost Wagnerian

WILLIAM LITTLER

The cheers echoing Sunday night through the packed, multi-storied Barbara Frum Atrium of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre greeted Canada's foremost composer on the occasion of his latest premiere, a major addition to this country's choral literature.

To perform R. Murray Schafer's 68 minute-long The Fall Into Light, Soundstreams Canada, in collaboration with the CBC, had brought together Canada's six leading professional choirs, together with their conductors, as well as the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus and its conductor, a half dozen percussionists and, to preside over the entire enterprise, the famous Estonian maestro Tonu Kaljuste.

Can't you just imagine the ghost of Richard Wagner smiling? For Schafer is the closest we have in this country to a composer with a vision of Wagnerian proportions, whose grandiose Patria series has already written a landmark chapter in the history of Canadian music theatre.

Schafer's aural imagination is positively cosmic, as choral aficionados familiar with his multi-choral Apocalypsis are already well aware.

Indeed, it was after "Credo," the second part of Apocalypsis, was performed in Toronto three Novembers ago that Soundstreams Canada's artistic director, Lawrence Cherney, approached the Ontario-based notesmith to write another work in a similar vein as a vehicle for our major professional choirs.

A seventh professional choir, the Nathaniel Dett Chorale under Brainerd Blyden-Taylor's direction, provided a four-number aperitif for the premiere, capped by a stirring account of Moses Hogan's Hold On.

But in all honesty, this Afrocentric ensemble has yet to achieve the artistic level of the Elmer Iseler Singers, Elora Festival Singers, Pro Coro Canada (of Edmonton), Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal, Tafelmusik Chamber Choir and Vancouver Chamber Choir.

For Schafer's work, these six ensembles and their conductors were situated around the Atrium's perimeter, with the children's chorus (whose pure-toned voices appeared only in the final measures) located in a balcony overhead, and Tonu Kaljuste on a podium viewable by all.

The audience consequently experienced the sensation of being surrounded by sound, with now one choir, now another taking the lead or offering a response as the music, set to a wide variety of mostly mystical literary sources, portrayed the Manichean theme of the fall of the soul from its heavenly home of light to the darkness of earth and its struggle to return.

A master of musical texture, Schafer portrayed the fall in a particularly vivid manner, with overlapping choirs reeling and writhing vocally in accordance with the text.

But he also introduced passages of hymn-like devotion and soaring lyrical beauty, drawing on the differing characters of the various choirs.

Some of the massed choral effects sounded stunning, but other passages, surrounding the descent into darkness, were profoundly understated and slow, almost static, again in accordance with the message of the text.

Words were occasionally spoken as well as sung, and in one sequence the different choirs repeated the word "why" over and over, almost as a drawn-out moan.

For all its variety of means, The Fall Into Light possesses a thematic unity that holds the ear. More than simply a catalogue of vocal effects, it offered a powerful statement of Manichean thinking, in a performance of thrilling impact.

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