Choirs Enchant Mead Chapel

This past weekend, the Vermont Collegiate Choral Consortium performed Gabriel Fauré’s Requiem at three locations around Vermont, including a Thursday night performance in Mead Chapel. The Consortium includes five choirs from Castleton State, Johnson State, Middlebury and Saint Michael’s Colleges and the University of Vermont (UVM). The Consortium started two years ago in the spring of 2000 with a joint performance between Middlebury College, Castleton State College and Saint Michael’s College. It was not until this year and the performance of Requiem that Johnson College and UVM joined the Consortium. For all three concerts, admission was free with a suggested $10 donation to the Consortium.

The concert began with each choir performing a single solo piece. Singing from the balcony seats of Mead Chapel, the choirs presented a wide array of songs, varying in origin, language and overall energy. Saint Michael’s College Chorale sang first, an African-American spiritual medley titled “Where the Sun Will Never Go Down.” The first parts of the piece started off slowly, featuring melodious ballads that drew in the audience to start a spectacular night of music. Paradoxically and unfortunately, the energy seemed to drop a bit as the piece picked up pace. Saint Michael’s Chorale was the only of the five choirs to feature a soloist, though at first she seemed to get lost among the energy of the rest of the choir. That is, until the finale, which featured a powerful back and forth between the soloist and the rest of the choir.

Middlebury College’s own choir sang “A Boy and a Girl,” a slower piece composed by Eric Whitacre. The haunting tones of this piece framed lyrics that told the story of, most appropriately, the growing love between a boy and a girl and follow them from their first kisses to their final moments, buried together after death. The energy and emotion behind this performance of “A Boy and a Girl” truly outlined Middlebury College Choir’s strength as a cohesive group of singers and was the highlight of the first half of the night.

After an intermission, the main event of the night began. Requiem is composed of seven separate movements and in between movements, the different directors of the choirs of the Consortium rotated the role of director for this night’s performance. A few days after the show, Director of Choral Activities Jeff Buettner spoke about the piece and he explained how Fauré’s Requiem was chosen.

“This piece was something we wanted all of our students to know when they leave college,” he said. “It is a piece that is performed frequently by symphony orchestras and choirs around the world and we wanted our students to be aware of that culture.”

The first movement started strong as the choirs enveloped the room with their voices. At times the organ seemed to come in too strongly or too abruptly. And where the voices championed the first movement, the strings stole the show during the second movement, “Offertory.” Their sounds guided the audience through both the images of Hell that haunt the lyrics of “Offertory” and the images of hope that pervade throughout the whole piece.

The performance featured two soloists. Suzanne Kantorski-Merrill, soprano, sang her solo during Pie Jesu, the fourth movement. Her solo was one of the highlights of the show, though it felt as though she was separated from the strings at points and the performance could have been enhanced by more interplay between her and the orchestra. The other soloist was David Nieween, a baritone, who sang during the piece’s sixth movement, “Libera Me.” His strong entry set the stage for a full ensemble build and one of the emotional high points of the night.

The climax of the piece came during the fifth movement, “Agnus Dei.” As the choirs sang words of redemption, the whole chamber orchestra built to an explosion of emotion and then dropped off into quiet lyrics that reflected the opening of the piece: “Grant them eternal rest, O Lord, and may perpetual light shine upon them.”

While the shear number of singers in the room, covering both the stage and the balconies above, was almost overwhelming, perhaps the most impressive part of the experience was the coordination it took to put it all together.

“One of our many challenges is that we do not have much time to rehearse the piece together,” said Buettner. “Each choir practiced it on their own for many weeks but for the whole performance we only had one day to rehearse the entire group and that puts pressure on things. You need to be very organized and anticipate what you will need to work on the most. But that’s also part of the fun.”

“My favorite part was when I would forget my own expectations for the music and I would simply listen and look up and see all of my students and all of these other students singing and listen to the beautiful sound that they were producing,” he continued. “It was really quite remarkable and incredibly rewarding because the music meant more than even what the piece was supposed to mean and that is the beauty of these major works. They’re something you have to put together with other people.”

Going forward, Buettner is hopeful for the future of the Consortium. During the 2013-14 academic year, the Middlebury College Choir will be on tour in Austria and Germany, so it is unlikely that there will be any major Consortium shows. However, after Middlebury College Choir’s return, the Consoritum plans to hit the ground running with more shows of the caliber of Fauré’s Requiem.