Sacra/Profana delivered on its name Sunday afternoon in a concert featuring both an Anglican mass for the dead and a secular cantata that might be performed at any memorial service.
Sacra/Profana’s concert venue of First Presbyterian Church tilted the event towards the sacred, but the chamber choir’s earnest performance of Dale Trumbore’s 2017 unaccompanied choral work “How to Go On” demonstrated its utility as a nondenominational examination of death, grief, and acceptance.
On first hearing, “How to Go On” sounds like a typical 21st century American tonal choral piece, but digging beneath its surface reveals more than simply stringing pleasant-sounding harmonies together as so many American choral composers seem content to do.
Trumbore carefully assembled lines from contemporary American poets Barbara Crooker, Laura Foley and Amy Fleury, setting them in a lush harmonic language that at times recalls her teacher Morten Lauridsen’s sonorities.
There are eight movements, but Trumbore allows conductors to select any number of them for a performance in any order, the only stipulation being that “When At Last,” her setting of lines from Amy Fleury’s “Sympathetic Magic,” always ends a performance.
Conductor Juan Carlos Acosta left out the longest movement, “Requiescat,” but otherwise duplicated the order of movements in the work’s premiere recording.
Other unusual aspects of “How to Go On” include long vocal glides, loosely coordinated rhythms and solos that give the singer several different choices of pitch.
The ending of “When At Last” consists of hummed chords, alternating between men’s and women’s voices.
Following the words “my soul,” the entire choir inhales for one measure and exhales the next without pitch, repeated ad infinitum as the conductor subtly cues each measure. This gesture did not read so well in the church’s large space, with intrusions from outdoor sounds and indoor fans; the breathing could have been exaggerated more to put across Trumbore’s point.
Aside from this, Acosta and the singers gave a clean, considered performance, including the many solos called for by Trumbore.
The size of Sacra/Profana varies depending on the concert. For Sunday, they had five singers to each section; a few more singers on each part would have been more effective, given the size of First Presbyterian and the subdivision of voices in both “How to Go On” and in Herbert Howells’ Requiem, the main offering in the second half of the program.
Howells was a mid-century British composer best remembered for his sacred choral music. His 1932 Requiem for unaccompanied voices was not performed until 1980, but has since become one of his most programmed pieces in the U.S.
For someone who purportedly adored Tudor sacred music, Howell wrote surprisingly little to no contrapuntal imitation in his Requiem. It largely declaims the text in solid syllabic settings.
The harmonies are reminiscent of Vaughan Williams’ modal works and its sentiments are respectful enough to be played at an Anglican funeral service; however, I fail to hear the merits of this work over choral music by contemporaries such as Stravinsky, Messiaen, Poulenc, Britten or even Vaughan Williams.
Sacra/Profana sang the Requiem with fine intonation and precise diction, although it was unclear why singers moved around onstage after each movement.
The audience favorite of the afternoon was the first half’s closer, “I’ll Be On My Way” by Shawn Kirchner, a rousing contemporary Christian hymn enhanced with piano work by Rachelle Butler and violin playing by bassist Adam Davis.
Following Howells’ Requiem, the program concluded with Christopher Ducasse’s “O Eternal Beauty,” a secular and pleasant enough composition whose intuitive nature was overshadowed by the craft and existentialism of “How to Go On.”
Hertzog is a freelance writer.