Herald Times
Tuesday, October 14, 2008

MUSIC REVIEW: UNIVERSITY SINGERS
Chorus, soloists raise their voices in stunning ‘Modalties’
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
By Peter Jacobi
H-T Reviewer

Bloomington—Conductor William Jon Gary attached the title “Modalities” to his interesting and beautifully performed concert with the University Singers Sunday afternoon at First United Church. He had chose works, mostly from the contemporary period, that reflected harmonic modes and properties of a religious past.
            The idea for such a program came to Gray as he sought to honor composer Ralph Vaughan Williams on the 50th anniversary of his death, this with a performance of his Mass in G Minor, a piece composed in 1922 but very much influenced by English music written in the 15th and 16th centuries. Constructed for double chours an dfour soloists, the score revisits liturgical music of that long ago period, utilizing a split choir antiphonally voicing independent lines in striking counterpoint. The Mass, much of it jubilant, even exultant, was splendidly sung, an that judgment certainly extends to the excellent soloists, well chosen from within the ensemble: soprano Colleen Hughes, mezzo Laura Thoreson, tenor Asitha Tennekoon and baritone Adam Ewing.
            Gray intriguingly coupled the Vaughan Williams with a 16th-century Latin motet by William Byrd, an “Ave verum Corpus,” to emphasize that sense of continuity in music written for the church. So, too, earlier on, he led the group in a hymn for Vespers, “Luci Creator optime,” (“Best Creator of the Light”), written by the Lithuanian Vytautas Miskinis but again suggestive of the timelessness in music of faith. It was coupled by an early 17th-century anthem by the British Orland Gibbons, “Almighty and Everlasting God.”
            All of the works chosen were, in some way or other, emothionally stirring, but none more so than the contribution of locally based composer Cary Boyce. His “Veni, veni Emmanuel” seamlessly yet contrastingly blends that old hymn sung in Latin with it sung in English, then almost miraculously interweaves these two plainchants with Boyce’s setting for a poignant 20th-century poem, “A Christmas Prayer (From the Trenches)” written by a British soldier, Cyril Winterbotham, while experiencing the front in World War I.
            One heard the Latin “Veni, veni Emmanuel; captivum solve Israel” alongside its text in translation, “O come, O come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel.” All the while, the dramatic treatment of Winterbothams’ account unfolded (“Not yet for us may Christmas bring good-will to men, and peace.” With a fine lyric tenor, Mark Van Arsdale, adding a solo element to this complex musical amalgam from the balcony, the effect was masterful and stunning, both as a composition and as realized by Gray and the University Singers.