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Music Review: Sometimes Those Magicians Of Song Need To Show What’s Up Their SleevesMagicians are generally ill advised to reveal their tricks, but when the conductor Kent Tritle let the audience in on a few crafty secrets during a concert by the Choir of St. Ignatius Loyola on Wednesday night, the tactic paid off. The major work on the program, presented at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola as part of its Sacred Music in a Sacred Space series, was the Concerto for Choir by Alfred Schnittke. Mr. Tritle and his choir performed the piece here in 2005; this time it was being recorded for a CD. The concerto, a 1985 setting of texts from the “Book of Lamentations” by the 10th-century Armenian monk St. Gregory of Narek, is one of Schnittke’s most sublime and mysterious creations. In place of his usual stylistic juxtapositions and brittle humor, he drew here on Russian liturgical music. To the spare a cappella textures and solemn pace of ancient tradition, Schnittke added a patina of generally mild dissonance. Some passages acquire an almost heartbreaking luminescence, others a terrifying edge. Ghostly voices seem to hover in the thickened air during climaxes. Before performing the work Mr. Tritle had his singers demonstrate the methods Schnittke used to create his special effects: a juxtaposition of similar melodies in slightly different rhythms to create a shimmer in the first movement, spreading the syllables of words among multiple singers to fashion a bell-like pulsation in the second. As it happened, understanding how Schnittke’s effects were created did not undercut a sense of awe inspired by the intense emotions they conjured. In the actual performance the singers did themselves proud, delivering a deeply heartfelt account with polished tone and excellent diction. Another elucidating gesture at the beginning of the concert had the choir deployed around front and side aisles to clarify musical strands in the dense, intricate 40-voice motet “Ecce Beatam Lucem” by the 16th-century Italian composer Alessandro Striggio. The choir sang passionately in Alberto Ginastera’s “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” a substantial, moving work composed in 1946 during Ginastera’s exile to the United States after Juan Perón had assumed power in Argentina. But here climaxes were shrill, and finer points of diction were lost to the resonant acoustic. Sacred Music in a Sacred Space will present a recital by the organist Stephen Hamilton on Feb. 24 at the Church of St. Ignatius Loyola; (212) 228-2520, smssconcerts.org. Tag CloudExternal InformationAdditional InformationMusic Review | ’Aimee Mann’: A Nod to the Season Doesn?t Come Without a Touch of...Met Opera to Expand Simulcasts in Theaters... A ?Figaro? With Youth, Agility and Eros... Bernstein’s New York: West Side and Beyond... Where Am I?News Main Page - Business - Music Review: Sometimes Those Magicians Of Song Need To Show What’s Up Their Sleeves |
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