PODCAST:

The Virginia Consort’s A Little May Music concert will take place on Saturday, May 9, at 7:30pm at St Paul’s Memorial Church.

TRANSCRIPT:

Coco Ahn:
The Virginia Consort presents “A Little May Music” on Saturday, May 9, at 7:30pm at St Paul’s Memorial Church. The concert will feature the ensemble’s Chamber chorus and Youth Chorale with piano and organ playing Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, Quartels Ripple Effect and varied madrigals. For Arts This Week, we spoke with Deke Polifka, the Consort’s music director.

Deke Polifka:

My name is Deke Polifka, and I’m the music director of the Virginia Consort here in Charlottesville. I also work full time at St Paul’s Memorial Church as the organist and choir director. And then I also work at UVA, accompanying the choral ensembles.

On May 9, Saturday, May 9, we have our season ending concert, and it is called A Little May Music. We have really diverse repertoire for that, everything from Renaissance madrigals to Latin-inspired setting of Psalm 150 sung by our youth chorale to Rejoice in the Lamb by Britten, and and Ripple Effect, which is a new work by Sarah Quartel, a Canadian composer. So all kinds of things on this program, a real eclectic mix. The concert opens with five very diverse madrigals, and three of them are early from the Renaissance period, one in English, one in French, and one in Italian to show that style. And then interspersed with that are two modern madrigals by Morton Lauridsen, who is a living composer, very famous. And these are some of his earlier works, very beautiful. So a madrigalis is a short piece, sometimes based on a folk song, but usually in the vernacular language. So you have, you know, Renaissance composers who are writing really high level church music that would also write these sort of popular pieces with with stories about life, you know, not just, not just sacred music kind of text, but one of the madrigals that we’re doing is about a woman praising her husband for doing all the chores around the household, and that’s why she loves him, that kind of thing. So there’s always a story. And so you get to see a different side of the composer. And it was really common for those composers to write both in the Sacred Realm and in that more popular style. So think of it almost as popular music at the time.

We also are featuring probably the largest work on the program is Benjamin Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb, which is a festival cantata with soloists and full choir and organ. Really wonderful. And then we also have a couple of contemporary pieces from our Youth Chorale, which is our high school age group, and then the last piece combines all the forces for that piece, Ripple Effect by Sarah Cordal. So really it’s a multi, multi generational, intergenerational choral organization that really promotes and sings choral music, and strives for choral excellence from the bottom up. So really, we have people from ages six to 85 in our ensemble. So it’s pretty cool. This particular concert features the chamber ensemble, which is about a 40 person choir. We have a lot of music teachers in that group, but all serious musicians, people from all different walks of life, particularly young professionals, teachers and people that do other things, that just have always sung and love choral music. Our high school ensemble, the Youth Chorale, which is singing on this concert, is usually singing with mentors from the Chamber Ensemble. So they’re not just doing their own thing. They’re incorporated into that. And a lot of times, like for Ripple Effect, which is our closing number for this concert, they sing with the full chamber ensemble and learn that, you know, along with us. We practice together on Monday nights, not always at the same in the same location, but we’re in the same building, and so almost every Monday, the Youth Chorale is doing something with members of the Chamber Ensemble, whether it’s just their pieces with mentors, or combining for something like Ripple Effect, which is pretty cool. So they learn the music on their own, partly, but then pretty quickly it’s put together with adults. So it’s a pretty unique system and experience for them, different than their high school choir. It’s a little bit daunting sometimes to plan this may program, because it can be anything, but I usually try to find one central work that we haven’t done recently or ever before, and then build the concert around that.

And so in this concert, we started with Rejoice in the Lamb, which is like a 17 minute cantata, and then thought, what could go with that and that.That cantata is very contrasting in its movements and styles. It has everything. The text is very wild as well, from Christopher Smart. And so along with that, I thought, okay, we can incorporate with that, some other things, like the diversity of languages, which is talked about in the in the Britten, in our madrigals, and also the idea of Ripple Effect, combining all the groups and creating a whole new rich texture of seven part choir. It’s pretty cool. You can do a lot with even a 40 person ensemble or 12 high school singers. And so you’ll hear solos. You’ll hear seven part piece with all of those forces. You’ll hear sort of simple but delightful madrigal settings. You’ll hear different languages, from Spanish to Italian to French to English. You’ll hear different instruments, from organ, piano, a cappella, hand percussion. There’s really just a lot that can be done, and we try to think about the venue that we’re at. And so St Paul’s has a really wonderful organ, and also a fantastic echoey acoustic that’s very live. And so I’m always thinking about that when we choose the repertoire of the space. This is our season finale, so we generally have a season preview sometime in the fall, and we sing a little bit from each concert. And then our Christmas concert is in early December, and we do a couple of those because they’re always very popular. And then, starting in January, we meet the adults as a festival chorus, which is a larger expanded group, which is meant to sing with full orchestra. And so our March concert, which is usually the first week of March, is that mid season, masterworks concert with full orchestra and Festival Chorus, and usually soloists and all kinds of things. And then the May concert is more of a chamber concert with our Chamber Ensemble and Youth Chorale. So the central work of our program is Benjamin Britten’s very imaginative and colorful Rejoice in the Lamb. He actually called it a festival cantata. It’s about 17 minutes long, and it’s quite diverse, with contrasting sections for choir and soloists. Although the work is often orchestrated, or it is orchestrated, it’s usually performed with organ, and the wonderful EM Skinner pipe organ at St Paul’s provides terrific accompaniment. The poetry is by Christopher Smart, 18th century poet, exploring the creative wonders of God in tigers, bears, bassoons, clarinets, a cat named Jeffrey, a mouse, and even letters of the alphabet. It’s probably an hour of music with a short, not really intermission, but a short interval in the middle.

Coco Ahn:
The Virginia Consort’s A Little May Music concert will take place on Saturday, May 9, at 7:30pm at St Paul’s Memorial Church. Featured works include Britten’s Rejoice in the Lamb and Quartel’s Ripple Effect, performed by the Virginia Concert Chamber Chorus and Youth Chorale with piano and organ. Learn more online at virginiaconsort.org. Advance ticket purchase is recommended. Arts This Week is supported by the UVA Arts Council and Piedmont Virginia Community College. PVCC Arts presents a rich array of dance, music, theater and visual arts programming. Learn more@pvcc.edu. For arts this week, this is Coco Ahn. You’re listening to WTJU.