IN CONCERT
What: Vox Humana and guests: Awaken Spring!
When/where: Saturday, 7: 30 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall (907 Pandora Ave., at Quadra St.)
Tickets: Adults $15, seniors $10, 25 and under free.
Call 250-483-4010; email info@voxhumanachoir.ca; online at voxhumanachoir.ca; in person at Long & McQuade and Ivy's Book Shop
What: Early Music Society of the Islands: VocaMe, Hymns of Kassia
When/where: March 3, 8 p.m., Alix Goolden Hall
Tickets: Adults $27, seniors and students $24, members $20. Call 250-386-6121; online at rmts.bc.ca; in person at Munro's Books, Ivy's Book Shop and the Royal and McPherson box offices
Two upcoming choral concerts offer a fascinating opportunity to sample music from both ends of the western tradition, separated by some 12 centuries.
On Saturday, the Vox Humana chamber choir, in collaboration with other local choirs, will herald the coming of spring with a program that includes contemporary music, even a world première.
A week later, the Early Music Society of the Islands will present the Munichbased ensemble VocaMe in a program devoted to the ninth-century Byzantine composer Kassia - some of the earliest western music ever notated, by the earliest female composer whose work survives. (She lived three centuries before the better-known Hildegard of Bingen.) For EMSI, this concert marks a breakthrough into new, truly rarefied territory.
Kassia was born in Constantinople around 810 into a wealthy family connected to the Byzantine court. She was beautiful and educated (she wrote poetry and philosophy), also proud and self-confident; a sassy retort cost her the hand of the Byzantine emperor, and as a religious activist she endured some persecution.
An important cultural figure and an advocate for women, she eventually became abbess of her own monastery near Constantinople, for which she wrote liturgical music. More than 50 hymns to Greek texts have been attributed to her, and many remain in use in the Greek Orthodox rite. She died by 867.
VocaMe was founded a few years ago by the medieval-music specialist Michael Popp expressly to champion Kassia's music.
The ensemble is composed of four female singers all with considerable experience in early music, directed by Popp, who also accompanies on various medieval instruments.
VocaMe has appeared at international festivals and on German radio and television, and in 2009 it released a gorgeous CD, on the Christophorus label, comprising 18 of Kassia's hymns.
These hymns, notated as plainchant, look unremarkable on paper, but are in fact musically sophisticated and innovative, the music closely mirroring the words in symbolic and programmatic ways.
VocaMe sings them variously as solos, duets and ensembles, a cappella or accompanied, sometimes over a vocal or instrumental drone, sometimes with rudimentary counterpoint or harmonic support.
Thus performed, the hymns emerge as remarkably lyrical and expressive, moving and even haunting, often sensual, occasionally pungently dissonant, with an "exotic" flavour befitting music straddling West and East.
Judging from the CD, recorded in a very resonant space, Kassia's music should be well served in Alix Goolden Hall, which was originally a church.
According to Popp, VocaMe's performers, in concert, like to move around, split up, create echo effects and so on, depending on the possibilities of a given space.
The March 3 program will feature the same hymns as the CD, interspersed with Popp's commentary and readings of Kassia's poems, offering, we are promised, "a meditative and spiritual journey for the soul and spirit."
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Last February, Vox Humana and other local ensembles - more than 80 singers in all - joined together in a massed-choir blowout that has become an annual event.
This year's equivalent, Awaken Spring!, will involve more than 150 singers of all ages, but predominantly young people.
"The idea behind this concert was to bring different young singers together to share the experience of preparing and performing choral music," says Brian Wismath, Vox's director. This is one of various educational-outreach initiatives through which Vox seeks to cultivate the next generation of choral-music performers and supporters.
On Saturday, Vox will join the two other ensembles Wismath conducts - the University of Victoria Chamber Singers and the Victoria Conservatory of Music Chorale - plus members of Ensemble Laude and Brentwood College School Concert Choir (both directed by Elizabeth MacIsaac) and choirs from Pacific Christian School (directed by Matthew Howe). The choirs will sing separately and together, mostly a cappella, sometimes with piano accompaniment.
The program, intended to be as accessible and widely appealing as possible, will range through various periods, countries and genres, and will include folk, gospel and world music.
Vox Humana will perform Three Songs of Faith by Eric Whitacre, a very popular American composer whose choral music has proven attractive to students, and will première a short 16-part piece it commissioned from Aaron Jensen, an internationally successful composer, arranger and performer based in Toronto.
Jensen's varied work includes music for theatre and film and, according to Wismath, his new piece, Head of Gold, Feet of Clay, set to a sacred Latin text, "is reminiscent of some great movie music, with pulsing rhythms and lots of thick textures."
Kevinbazzana@shaw.ca
