It takes a large measure of self-confidence for a performing group to assert its virtuosity in its name. But the New York Virtuoso Singers practice truth in advertising. The singers in this 16-voice chamber chorus, now in its 12th season under their founding conductor, Harold Rosenbaum, really are virtuosos. They would have to be, since they specialize in challenging contemporary music. On Saturday night at Merkin Concert Hall, the Singers presented the first of three concerts in a series this season called 'Voices of the Century,' a retrospective of 20th-century a cappella choral works that began last season. Saturday's program focused on composers from Italy and Eastern Europe. Perhaps an a cappella concert of contemporary music looks on paper like a rigorously intellectual evening.
But these 16 singers in an intimate recital hall provided more sheer excitement and beauty of sound than you will experience many an evening at the symphony. It was a brilliant idea, and not such a stretch, to begin this 20th-century program with the 'Ave Maria' from the 'Four Sacred Pieces' of Verdi. Composed in 1889, the 'Ave Maria' was based on an enigmatic scale that Verdi saw printed as a puzzle in a music journal. Andrew Porter has called the piece 'slight, a curiosity.' ' But as performed here, with its wayward vocal lines, exotic harmonies and toehold on tonality, the 'Ave Maria' was haunting, almost futuristic.
It was revealing to hear the Verdi along with Dallapiccola's two 'Cori di Michelangelo' from 1933. If Verdi was looking forward, Dallapiccola, then 29, was looking backward.
There are intentionally archaic qualities in the sonorous harmonic language of the piece. But Dallapicolla, the elegantly lyrical 12-tone composer to be, is already stepping out as well.
The Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki is a noted explorer of eerie sounds that blur the borders between tonality and atonality and between consonance and dissonance. He also has a melodramatic streak.
But in the two works performed here, 'Song of Cherubim' and 'Veni Creator Spiritus,' the precision and pungency of his sound explorations seemed bracing and original. Luciano Berio's 'Cries of London' is a wild idea, a sort of updated version of the Renaissance London 'street cries' madrigal, in which composers integrated everyday phrases and bits of folk tunes into this sophisticated polyphonic genre. Berio makes up his street cries, which have a bit of Gertrude Stein about them ('one penny two pennies two a penny come to me'), and fabricates the folk tunes. The work is a musically fractured delight, and the chorus performed it winningly. Gyorgy Ligeti's 'Drei Phantasien,' on texts of Holderlin, is boldly experimental.
The choral writing alternates moments of almost free-for-all chaos with nearly motionless passages of harmonic shimmerings. Holding the pitches true was just one of the challenges the chorus mastered.
With luck, the audience will be larger for the next two events in this exciting series, in January and May.
Luciano Berio (1925-2003): Cries of London, per 8 voci (1975). Parti 1-5 Swingle II diretti da Luciano Berio.
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Cries of London for eight voices (1976) Cries of London, for eight voices (two sopranos, two contraltos, two tenors and two basses), are a reworking of an earlier piece bearing the same name for six voices (two contraltos, one tenor, two baritone and one bass), written in 1974 for the King’s Singers. In this new version, the Cries of London become a short cycle of seven vocal pieces of folk nature, where a simple piece regularly alternates with a more elaborate one. The first and third “Cry” have the same text. Serial office visio premium 2010. The fifth “Cry” is the exact repetition of the first one. The seventh piece, “Cry of Cries”, is a commentary on the preceding “Cries”. As it takes on their melodies and their harmonic characters, it also moves away from them musically, as a distant echoing As a whole, this short cycle can also be listened to as an exercise in musical characterization and dramatization.
Berio Cries Of London
The texts have been chosen among the famous cries of Old London street vendors. Luciano Berio.
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