Geistliches Lied (performed by Chattanooga Bach Choir)
That Brahms was a devoted student of early music and contrapuntal technique who spent a lifetime examining and building a library of Renaissance and Baroque works is a fact easy to forget under the spell of the gentle but lush harmonies of this piece, composed in 1856. Beneath the façade of romanticism, the four voices move in double canon, with bass line imitating the alto and tenor the soprano, all separated by the interval of a ninth. A relaxed and expansive amen ends the piece, enhancing the charm of a serious and technically masterful work that is a favorite of many choirs.
Alleluia (performed by Choral Arts of Chattanooga)
Randall Thompson’s Alleluia, a popular a cappella piece for modern choirs, was commissioned in 1940 by Serge Koussevitzky, the director of the Tanglewood Festival. The piece he imagined for the opening of that year’s festival was a fanfare of great joy. Thompson, however, very much aware of the war in Europe and France’s falling to its enemy, believed that a cheerful piece would be out of place at that point in history and spent July 1-5 composing a thoughtful work that was quiet, slow, and, in Thompson’s own words, “comparable to the Book of Job, where it is written, "The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” Performed for the first time on July 8, 1940, the work became popular almost immediately and is his most frequently performed work.
Sanctus (performed by Choral Arts of Chattanooga)
Frank Martin (1890-1974), born to a Swiss Calvinist minister, composed his Mass for Double Chorus in the 1920s, but kept it out of the public eye, finally allowing it to be performed in 1963. “I did not want it to be performed,” he remarked, “since I was afraid that it would be judged from a purely aesthetic viewpoint. I considered it at the time as being a matter between God and myself.” Since that first hearing, many have found his work moving and beautiful. Austere yet inspiring, this work is now seen as one of the great twentieth-century mass settings for unaccompanied chorus, of comparable stature to equal of choral achievements such as the Vaughan Williams Mass in G Minor (1920-1921, also for double chorus).
The Creation (performed by both choirs)
Though Franz Joseph Haydn spent the bulk of his professional life in rural Hungary at the Esterhazy estate, he managed to stay abreast of developments in Europe’s musical hubs through the steady stream of visitors to the Prince’s abode. When he made his second trip to London in 1794-95, however,he was exposed to something engrossing and new -- the oratorios of Georg Frideric Handel. The experience electrified him, stunning him with a scope of development and interplay of counterpoint and homophony. During that same trip, Johann Peter Salomon, the impresario who had arranged Haydn’s British sojourn, offered him a libretto in English that featured a combination of texts from Genesis and John Milton’s Paradise Lost – and which may well have been offered previously to Handel -- and bade him fashion from it an oratorio in the English tradition. Haydn agreed and took it back to Vienna with him. Finding his English unequal to the demands of the text, he solicited the aid of Baron Gottfried van Swieten, a diplomatic retiree of considerable wealth. Swieten produced a text based on the original but altered it here and there for the sake of musical line or expression. Haydn set the resulting German text to music between 1796 and 1798, and Die Schopfung was born. It debuted in Vienna on March 19, 1799, Haydn’s name-day, and rocketed immediately to a popularity that rivaled The Messiah and achieved a level of artistry that Handel himself would have coveted.
Further textual dramas befell the piece on its way to becoming The Creation. Van Swieten provided an English translation of the translated German, but the differing syntaxes and inflections between German and English put dramatic musical climaxes on prepositions, and some over-ornate phrasings confused listeners. In 1957, Robert Shaw and Alice Parker revised the libretto to rid the piece to create a better meshing of music and language. Today’s performance features their version of the text.
The Creation, like most oratorios, has three parts (the first two of which will be performed today). The piece opens with a phenomenal piece of tone-painting of a world “without form and void,” as the orchestra produces fragments of melody, vague harmonies, and open chords that eventually move towards wholeness and order. After this introductory movement, Haydn lets the voices of three archangels– Raphael (tenor), Gabriel (soprano) and Uriel (bass) – narrate God’s bringing all into being, with spectacular bursts of commentary and worship provided intermittently by the chorus. Haydn offers a smorgasbord of musical flavor ranging from the simple to the elegant, but he provides throughout his own inborn originality along with lessons learned from Handel.