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Renaissance rocks with Atlanta Schola Cantorum
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW Atlanta Schola Cantorum. Saturday at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church in Decatur. www.atlantaschola.org.
People who sing sacred Renaissance music are the only ones who can confidently assert that the world has, indeed, gone to hell in a handbasket. In performance, the luminous purity and perfection of masses and motets by Palestrina and Victoria feels like the pinnacle of a civilization. In comparison, everything since — including Bach and Mozart — sounds worldly and blemished and grimy.
Celebrating its 30th anniversary, the Atlanta Schola Cantorum specializes in Renaissance polyphony. The 33-voice amateur choir — many of whom are church musicians from around town — give just a couple of concerts a year. Conducted by Jennifer Kane, they tapped this holiest of repertoires Saturday at Decatur’s Holy Trinity Episcopal Church, a space of stark and soaring modernist architecture.
They trawled great depths in Victoria’s brief motet titled “O magnum mysterium” (“O great mystery”) and, without pause, moved into his six-movement mass of the same name. In the motet, when they sang the words “O beata Virgo” (“O blessed Virgin”) you got the striking sensation that the composer’s love of the Virgin Mary isn’t strictly spiritual — all at once, the music is exhilarating, sweet, agonizing and intensely poignant, the stuff of unrequited mortal love. Yet, true to form, everything is perfect in balance, structure and sensibility.
Such depth of expression — a fusion of harmonies and texts — was the hallmark of Kane and her singers throughout the concert. In three languages, Latin, English and French, their diction remained clear. Although the men sometimes produced thin (or flattened) sounds, the group’s overall vitality and intelligence carried every piece.
Interspersed between works of 16th and early-17th century masters Palestrina, Sweelinck and Clemens non Papa were links to the more modern world.
From the Russian Orthodox liturgy they sang “Virgin Mother of God” by Arvo Part, an Estonian composer born in 1935 whose every new score — in his distinctive neo-medieval style — is a major cultural event.
Minnesota-based composer Rene Clausen’s richly textured “Set me as a seal” flattered the schola’s women, with divided parts for sopranos and altos.
American revolution New England was represented by William Billings’s biblical “Rose of Sharon.” There’s a plain-spokenness to Billing’s music. Direct and un-tormented, a line like “The voice of my beloved! Behold, he cometh, leaping upon the mountains…” comes across with the blunt heave-ho of a sea-chanty. Then, a moment later, he sets the words “Rise up, my love, my fair one, and come away” with tender, overlapping voices — a desperate, fragile opening of the heart.
As an encore, they sang an arrangement of “Parting Friends,” an 1846 shape-note hymn by John McCurry, from the mountains of north Georgia.
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