Musical miracle at St. Andrew's

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Posted: October 21, 2009 - 11:19 am

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... and other recent music events

By Mike Dunham

I attended four concerts in three days last weekend, starting with the Anchorage Civic Orchestra’s performance in Sydney Laurence Theatre on Friday, Oct. 16. The program included Rossini’s Overture to “Semiramide” and Mendelssohn’s “Reformation” Symphony. The most successful piece was Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” for which the UAA University Singers and the choir from St. John United Methodist Church combined to form a suitable chorus of about 50 voices. The instrumental side benefitted from flawless playing by oboist Emily Weaver and fine piping on the baroque trumpet from Kerry Maule.

On Saturday I returned to the same venue for folk/pop veterans The Refugees, whom we hope to hear again . A review of their Anchorage show ran on Oct. 19 and earlier posted on this site.

It’s rare for me to put a program of contemporary choral music at the top of my must-hear list, even rarer to head out to Eagle River to hear it. But the Alaska Chamber Singers’ weekend presentation included pieces by composers like Arvo Part and Henryk Gorecki whose sweeping, nebulous style I’ve grown to enjoy. Also, I was curious to hear the acoustics of St. Andrew’s Church, which I’d been told were miserable for spoken words but sumptuous for music.

St. Andrew’s interior space is enormous, almost as tall as it is wide, in the shape of a cross with large square coves filling out each corner. The seating forms a fan around the altar. For the first half I sat roughly front and center and felt like I was in a bath of chords.

The music was, in some cases, stupefying in its complexity; the wordless “Past Life Melodies” by Australian Sarah Hopkins, for instance, required the singers to conjure up overtones, as in Tibetan chant or throat-singing.

I’d guess the reverb time is almost two full seconds. But despite the “wall of sound” effect, the separate voices could all be made out clearly; the sopranos were admirably on pitch even while singing in the stratosphere; the bases were firmly present.

After intermission I slithered into a far corner of a cove to see whether the resonance held up. The illusion was even more astonishing. The loudest parts of Gorecki’s “Amen” sounded as if they were being sung from the middle of the room, 15 feet in the air above the pews. As the volume diminished, it seemed to physically recede back to where the singers stood. It was one of the most beautiful, magical and exciting things I’ve ever heard anywhere.

The low point was an assortment of pieces by renaissance master Josquin des Prez accompanied by the improvised jazz sax stylings of Richard Zelinsky, apparently because someone somewhere had already tried it and it would make Josquin “contemporary.” The choir sang well. Zelinsky played well. But the combination left the taste of sauerkraut on a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Happily the Chamber Singers will be returning to St. Andrews for future concerts starting with their Christmas program on Dec. 4 and 5. (The first takes place in their regular Anchorage Venue, Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.) We’d love to hear more renaissance and early baroque fare there; they sort of owe us an un-saxed all-des Prez program.

After that paradisiacal afternoon, I found myself at the Egan Center for the Fraternal Order of Alaska State Troopers’ fund-raiser featuring rock veterans Billy Joe Royal (“Down in the Boondocks”) and Bobby Vee (“Take Good Care of My Baby”) hoping that they’d held up as well over time as the women of The Refugees.

Alas, Royal’s high notes are gone, but at least he still has the bottom half of his register. His stiff stage presence was exceeded in dullness only by the unsalted popcorn sold at the snack stand.

Vee was more animated and still knows how to work his six-string, but whatever charm may once have adorned his highly affected voice is long gone. The antics of the bass player added some interest, but efforts to involve the mixed-age crowd in singing the well-known lyrics fell flat.

Vee suggested he was ready to play until midnight. I suddenly remembered an urgent load of laundry I needed to do and left somewhat before that hour, regretting that after the Eagle River concert I didn’t turn the other way onto the Glenn Highway and caught The Refugees’ show at Vagabond Blues in Palmer.

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