The joyful ring of young voices
There is nothing quite so angelic sounding as children’s chorus. The light high purity of tone is sweet to the human ear, and composers through the centuries have written for its timbre. That was proven once again when the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choruses took to the stage in Alameda to present their 34th annual Candlelight Concert.
Held at St Joseph’s Basilica this past Sunday, the concert featured the four choral groups that compose the performing choruses of the organization: Concert Choir, Ensemble, Ancora and Ecco. These choruses are comprised of young people from fifth grade children to young adults finishing high school.
The singers audition into these four choruses, but training can begin much earlier – as early as the first grade. So by the time a singer is ready to audition into one of the performing choruses, he or she may have been singing for four years, that is to say, a third of their lives.
No wonder the choral sound is so celestial.
The concert opened with the Concert Choir, garbed in their green shirts and black pants and skirts. With singers from fifth to eighth grade, the choir performed multiple harmony pieces under the direction of Andrew Brown, the melodic lines floating over repeating rhythmic passages. After three songs, the choir was joined by Ensemble.
Although including singers in the 10th grade, both choruses require the singers – male and female – to be in the treble range. The two choruses sang “There was a child went forth every day” from Stacy Garrop’s oratorio Terra Nostra. Concert Choir and Ensemble, under Geary’s direction, presented a sweetly moving vocal excerpt from the oratorio.
The oratorio, commissioned by the San Francisco Choral Society, had premiered in its entirety two weeks earlier, when the full performance included four soloists, adult chorus, children’s chorus and orchestra. Over 250 singers and musicians. Comprised of legends and myths around the world, Terra Nostra is described by Garrop “as a meditation on nothing less than humanity and its place on the planet.” Both the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choirs and their Artistic Director Robert Geary were instrumental in this homage to life.
It is to Geary’s credit and honor that he works with the many talented and original composers writing in the Bay Area. These compositions, given their contemporary use of complex harmonies and rhythms, are most often assigned to the advanced choirs. Ancora, the young women’s chorus (grades nine through 12), sang works by Ann Callaway and Daniel Nelson. Eric Tuan, the new director of the Ecco chorus, arranged the well-known Christmas Carol “Ding Dong Merrily on High” for the group.
Callaway’s “Silvery Blue” carried on the theme expressed by Garrop’s oratorio, and was a meditation on the natural world of California, its golden hills and its native silvery blue butterfly. Rhythmically challenging and harmonically complex, the piece was beautifully realized by this formidably skilled chorus.
Daniel Nelson provided an equally moving piece “I Am in Need of Music” that also touched on human desire for peace, weaving images of music’s healing magic into those of nature, so that the fitful heart “floats forever in a moon-green pool/ Held in the arms of rhythm.”
Eric Tuan led Ecco in the final set of the evening. Comprised of some 40 mixed voices: young men with changed voices, and young women in 10th grade or above, Ecco sang several a cappella pieces, beginning with “Daemon Irrepit Callichus” (The Devil Speaks Expertly), a fiery choral work by the contemporary Hungarian composer György Orbán. The chorus also premiered Mark Winges’ “Fog Dissolving into Moon,” from Weaving the Night. “Fog Dissolving” is sung in sounds rather than words, imitating the sound field created by the mysterious flow and ebb of fog. Winges is a long-time collaborator, creating several commissioned works for the choruses.
The evening closed with a rollicking version of the spiritual “Music Down in My Soul.” Eric Tuan directed from the piano, while providing splendid accompaniment.
It was a thoroughly lovely concert.
– Jaime Robles
Photo: Artistic Director Robert Geary conducts the Concert Choir and Ensemble choruses in Stacy Garrop’s “There was a child went forth every day” from the oratorio Terra Nostra. Photo by Rita Forte.