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Resonance Ensemble review: context counts

July 3, 2017
Music

by TERRY ROSS

Be careful with your programming.

This advice would have been well heeded by Katherine FitzGibbon in putting together the June 24 concert of her choir Resonance Ensemble at Portland’s Yale Union. Instead, what might have been a cohesive program of music in support of the featured selection, a very well-crafted piece by a local composer, became a very mixed bag of good, bad, and boring music.

Resonance Ensemble’s Katherine FitzGibbon and composer Renée Favand-See. Photo: Rachel Hadiashar Photography.

The main attraction, Only in Falling, which Resonance commissioned and premiered in 2014, is a 25-minute essay in five parts, each a setting of verses by Kentucky poet Wendell Berry (b. 1934). The poetry itself is very strong in its evocation of nature, especially in the first three movements, and composer Renée Favand-See does it justice in short bursts of sensitive part-writing. The second movement, “For the Future,“ made skillful use of Resonance Ensemble’s seven male singers (eight were listed in the program), and the third, “Woods,” proved a lovely vehicle for mezzo-soprano Cecily Kiester.

The music was just as interesting and even beautiful in the fourth and fifth movements, but these suffered from an overload of text. The fourth, “The Law That Marries All Things,” is in five separate parts, and although soprano Lindsey Cafferky, tenor Les Green and baritone Kevin Walsh sang their solos convincingly, the music dragged out to nine minutes and failed to have the impact of the shorter opening three movements, which lasted a total of eight minutes together. And in movement five, “The Wheel,” the long text, declaimed rapidly, was utterly lost despite the efforts of Mr. Green and soprano Vakaré Petroliunaité.

Still, the overall effect of Ms. Favand-See’s piece is overwhelmingly positive; it shows a genuine composer’s gift in its melodies and structures, and one looks forward to its release on a recording soon. On the other hand, there is no excuse for presenting Nikole Potulsky’s amateurish and lame three-minute song “Baby Mine,” which the composer sang, accompanying herself (amateurishly) on guitar, on which her repertoire consisted of three chords (I-IV-V). However unfortunate it was that Ms. Potulsky was mourning the death of three babies — in her own miscarriage and in a friend’s and a cousin’s still-births — there’s no reason to allow empathy to overrule musical taste and judgment.


Video: Alan Niven, Wolf Traks.

In contrast, Dominick Di Orio’s five-minute You Do Not Walk Alone featured a very effective repeated gesture of pausing on a dissonant chord on the word “walk” before finally resolving into a consonance emphasizing the title’s message. And Steven Sametz’s I Have Had Singing, although only two minutes long, was an excellent setting of a wonderful quote from Ronald Blythe’s Akenfield, Portland of an English Village (1969), well worth printing here in its eloquent entirety:

The singing. There was so much singing then and this was my pleasure, too. We all sang, the boys in the field, the chapels were full of singing. Here I lie: I have had pleasure enough; I have had singing.

A piece called Last Letter Home by the well-known American choral composer Lee Hoiby (1926-2011) was skillful enough in its writing, but it dipped into bathos in quoting in full a soldier’s longish letter to his wife, and it consisted of seven unrelenting minutes of homophony, in which all the singers sang the text together in hymn-like harmony. Jake Runestad’s The Peace of Wild Things, on yet another text by Wendell Berry, also relied monotonously on homophony, although with occasional repetitions.

It remains to mention Oregon Symphony violinist Greg Ewer for a dandy version of J.S. Bach’s famous Chaconne (written for solo cello), although it seemed odd among its surroundings of choral music; soprano Kathleen Hollingsworth for her soulful concert-opening rendition of the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in its arrangement by Jester Hairston; and actor Vin Shambry’s three monologues. The first of these introduced, very briefly, Mr. Sametz’s piece; the third, also very brief, came before a concert-closing rendition of Johannes Brahms’s Geistliches Lied, Op. 30 (Sacred Song), in which the Resonance basses demonstrated a furry sound not evident before. Shambry’s second monologue, however, which opened the concert’s second half and came directly before Ms. Favand-See’s piece, was wildly off-target in its impersonation, in a slow, rhythmic rap style, of a Black Lives Matter screed about life on the ghetto’s mean streets and murderous cops, although blacks were not, to my recollection, specifically mentioned. This small bit of actorly free expression was desperately out of place and unwelcome in this setting.

Renée Favand-See’s piece deserved better, much better, than the on-again off-again programming of this concert.

Recommended recordings

• DiOrio
Soft Blink of Amber Light (Msr 1499), 2015.

• Runestad
Reincarnations: A Century of American Choral Music (Seraphic Fire Media 13), 2014.

• Bach Chaconne
Hilary Hahn, violin (YouTube), 1997.

• Hoiby
A Pocket of Time (Naxos 8.559375), 2009.

• Sametz
I Have Had Singing, Chanticleer (Arsis 161), 1994.

• Favand-See, Only in Falling
to be recorded soon

• Brahms Geistliche Lied
Brahms & Bruckner: Motets, Tenebrae, Nigel Short conducting (Signum Classics SIGCD430), 2015.

Terry Ross is a Portland freelance journalist and the director of The Classical Club, through which he offers classical music appreciation sessions. He can be reached at classicalclub@comcast.net.

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