Oregon Music News

Conductor Katherine FitzGibbon

The singers of the Resonance Ensemble, led by its artistic director Katherine FitzGibbon, explored the concept of “Blessed Unions” in the final concert of its inaugural season on Friday, April 29, at Agnes Flanagan Chapel. The choir undertook a challenging program, singing works by Johannes Brahms, Maurice Duruflé, Benjamin Britten, Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Daniel Pinkham, and topping it all off with a complex work by Igor Stravinsky.

The concert began innocently enough with selections from the Liebeslieder Walzer (Love Song Waltzes) of Brahms. Susan DeWitt and Jon Stuber accompanied the ensemble with piano four-hands. The music was lively and spirited, giving the audience a sense of tantalizing courtship between lovers, but clearer diction would have helped to conquer the muddy acoustics of the Chapel.

The Brahms was followed by a set of a cappella pieces, beginning with Duruflé’s serene Ubi Caritas, which the choir sang with delicate care, impeccable intonation, excellent blend, and terrific balance. The choir showed excellent blend with Britten’s Concord, but more diction would have upped the expressive content of this piece. The choir beautifully sang the Bogoroditse Devo from Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil, but it seemed as if its crescendo near the end of the piece was not as loud as it could’ve been because of the acoustics of the Chapel.

Next, the choir performed Daniel Pinkham’s Wedding Cantata, which has four movements. Soprano Melanie Downie Zupan and Scot Crandal did well with their brief solos in the first section, “Rise Up, My Love,” but the choir was much more expressive in the other sections, the plaintive “Many Waters,” the boisterous “Awake, O North Wind,” and the soothing “Set Me As a Seal.”

After intermission, the ensemble sang Stravinsky’s Les Noces (The Wedding), a tough piece for any choir to attempt because of its unrelenting rhythmic drive and its near-atonal style, which hampers the ability to find the right pitch. Overall, the music, which sounds mechanistic at times, is an odd way to represent a Russian folk wedding, but that’s Stravinsky. The choir jumped through all of the technical hurdles without hesitation, including the hurdle of singing the entire piece in Russian. Yet whenever the percussion battery joined in the fray, it was too loud for the choir. On the plus side, pianist Susan DeWitt Smith, positioned behind the choir, did an excellent job of not overpowering the singers, and all of soloists (Maria Karlin, Cecily Kiester, Cahen Taylor, and Erik Hundtoft) sang with conviction.

Even though the text was printed in the program (with accompanying SATB designations), it was very difficult to make sense of the work. Dancer Diana Schutz did her best to portray the story of the piece, but in the end, it didn’t help all that much. Supertitles would have solved the problem, but that would have been an expensive solution. Overall, the Resonance Ensemble, and FitzGibbon must be commended for taking on such a difficult piece, and it looks as if their marriage (one full season so far) is still in the honeymoon period when anything is possible.