Reviews of past Bella Voce concerts:
BELLA VOCE GIVES ELOQUENT VOICE TO TWO RARE REQUIEMS
Chicago Classical Review, October 19, 2009
Lawrence A. Johnson
Over its 27-year history, first as His Majestie’s Clerkes and currently as Bella Voce, the a cappella vocal ensemble has presented a significant amount of new works (Frank Ferko’s Stabat mater among them) and a discerning mix of familiar and overlooked repertory.
It’s too bad that the turnout was so sparse Saturday night for Bella Voce’s season opener at St. James Cathedral. Perhaps the program of two relatively little-known requiems was too adventurous for more conservative audience members.
That’s unfortunate because under the skillful and sensitive direction of Andrew Lewis, the Bella Voce singers distinguished themselves, in glowing, responsive performances of music that deserve to be much better known. The good news is that the program will be repeated this weekend in River Forest and Evanston (see below) and you owe it to yourself to hear these fine performances.
Cristobal de Morales became an unlikely crossover success a decade ago when the Hilliard Ensemble teamed up with jazz saxophonist Jan Garbarek for a striking improvisational retooling of early chant and masses, spotlighting the Spanish composer’s monastic polyphony.
Morales’ Missa pro defunctis of 1544 was one of the first masses “for the dead,” and remains one of the glories of the Renaissance. The stately slow-moving polyphony is crafted with the greatest skill and subtlety, voices interwoven masterfully. Like much church music of the period, the drama is more suggested than overt—the Dies irae sounds wholly untroubled and, perhaps, the alternation of high and low voices in the Sequentia becomes a bit repetitive.
But this is extraordinarily beautiful music, distinctive in its multipart writing and division of voices. Lewis and his 17 singers provided a radiant, deeply moving account of Morales’ Missa with striking bell-like purity from the ensemble’s altos.
Four centuries after Morales’ mass was published, Herbert Howells wrote his Requiem. Breaking a decade-long compositional silence, Howells’ work was a private expression of overwhelming grief in the wake of the death of his nine-year-old son in 1936. The Requiem wasn’t performed until 1981, forty-five years after its composition.
Like Brahms, Howells mixes sacred and secular texts and at its finest the Requiem has extraordinary power and eloquence. The two Requiem aeternam sections are most inspired, high voices set soaring in the first and radiating an otherworldly peace and serenity in the second. Lewis and his 22 singers gave Howells’ Requiem masterful advocacy with superb solo singing in a scrupulously blended and affecting performance.
The Requiem was preceded by Howells’ Take Him Earth, for Cherishing. Written for a memorial service honoring President John F. Kennedy, Howells’ work begins in simple homophonic fashion before erupting with thorny Matthias-like dissonance in the middle section. Under Lewis’s’ direction, Bella Voce gave rich and vehement expression to this music.
Bella Voce's class and style put it ahead of the choral pack
Chicago Tribune, April 30, 2009
JOHN von RHEIN
Andrew Lewis doesn't hold back when singing the praises of Bella Voce. Nor should he.
"I don't take credit for this, but I think this group of singers does the music chosen for it better than anyone in the city," says Lewis, a former member of Bella Voce who has directed the Chicago vocal ensemble since 2006. He goes on to laud his 24 singers for "the sense of responsibility and dedication" that imbues their performances with "the joy of making music at a very high level."
That much was readily apparent at a Bella Voce program I caught last weekend and which will be repeated this coming weekend in two suburban churches.
The program of unaccompanied English choral works showed how decisively Lewis, 36, has cast the group in his musical image since taking over the reins from Anne Heider, the longtime artistic director of the choir that began life in 1982 as His Majestie's Clerkes.
A fair amount of music was by Ralph Vaughan Williams, whose quintessentially English pastoralism Lewis surrounded with works by his forebears Gibbons, Byrd and Purcell and contemporaries Howells, Finzi and Britten. Tavener's "Funeral Ikos" suggested the extent to which newer British choral music has broadened its stylistic reach.
All this Bella Voce achieved with finely judged blend, intonation and ensemble, also a sensitivity to how music and poetry combine to produce something even greater. The vaulted nave of Chicago's St. James Cathedral surrounded the voices with an ethereal glow.
I can't think of another choral group in the area that could have brought off such a challenging program so expertly. Bella Voce means "beautiful voice" in Italian; clearly these singers don't take their name lightly.
Separated at Birth?
Chicago Tribune April 17, 2007
JOHN von RHEIN
Chicago's reputation as a teeming hive of choral performance got a further boost over the weekend when two of the city's leading vocal ensembles presented concerts.
Bella Voce, appearing Sunday at St. James Cathedral, 65 E. Huron St., paired the British composers Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten. Chicago a cappella, performing Friday at the DePaul University Concert Hall, built its program around works by Argentinian composers. Both events were worth hearing and showed real artistic enterprise, although Bella Voce delivered the more polished performance.
Britten always claimed he learned how to set English texts by studying the music of Purcell, and choral music represents an important part of each man's output. The selections assembled by Bella Voce artistic director Andrew Lewis showed how much the two Britons, separated by more than 200 years, had in common.
Interestingly, sometimes it was Purcell who sounded like the "modern" innovator, and Britten the traditionalist. Certainly the former's "Funeral Sentences," its charged chromatic lines bumping into one another to create seething dissonances, sounded almost as radical as anything by Britten.
Dissonant harmonic clashes also heighten the expressive power of Britten's 1939 "A.M.D.G." ("Ad majorem Dei gloriam"), to religious poems by Gerard Manley Hopkins. The striking melodic leaps, intricately laced part-writing and other musical hurdles were met most handsomely by the 23-member chorus.
Lewis had his ensemble singing with the pure tone, clear vowels and firm blend of an English cathedral choir in such Purcell anthems as "I Was Glad," "Blow Up the Trumpet in Sion" and "Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secrets of Our Hearts." Paul Nicholson was the organist.
An erudite musician and a proficient choral director, he impresses as a worthy successor to the group's longtime artistic leader, Anne Heider.
Chicago a cappella's program included the Midwest premiere of "The Wanderer," a new work by New York-based Argentinian composer Ezequiel Vinao, as well as the Chicago premiere of a piece for unaccompanied chorus by Chicago Symphony resident composer Osvaldo Golijov. The chamber choir was expanded to a dozen singers for the weekend concerts under artistic director Jonathan Miller.
"The Wanderer," a co-commission with the San Francisco men's chorus Chanticleer, is set to an Anglo-Saxon text in the composer's own English translation. The bleak austerity of this music reflects the struggle of a lost soul from alienated despair to Christian salvation.
The six-part scoring employs drones and vocal ornaments, drawing on techniques borrowed from medieval and Renaissance polyphony. The sound, however, is thoroughly contemporary, as the intertwining vocal lines create restless fields of atonal ebb and flow. Textural variety is achieved by assigning the narration to single and multiple voices rising from the polyphonic thickets.
This is one of the most challenging pieces any chorus can perform, requiring rock-solid pitch and ensemble that sometimes eluded the group on Friday. One admired the earnest effort Miller's singers poured into the performance, but, at 30 grim and gray minutes, "The Wanderer" felt too long by half.
More accessible were Golijov's "Chorale of the Reef" and Ginastera's "Lamentations of Jeremiah." Much of the Golijov's exquisite effect derives from unison voices rapidly chanting the Pablo Neruda text, evoking ancient oceanic imagery through subtle deployment of pitch and rhythm.
PREVIEW: BELLA VOCE SPRING 2007
New City Chicago, April, 2007
DENNIS POLKOW
What a difference a couple of years can make. Bella Voce, the area’s premier chamber choir, was on the verge of disappearing due to money problems in the difficult post-9/11 arts-funding environment, and the subsequent retirement of its longtime music director Anne Heider looked like it might be the group’s swan song. A new Board resurrected Bella Voce and the appointment of new music director Andrew Lewis was announced last fall, with Lewis directing his first concerts as music director over Christmas. The energy, precision, balance and repertoire choices that Lewis brought to those spectacular performances made it easy to see why he was chosen as the new music director and the group itself not only sounded as glorious as it ever had, but it was obviously having a ball singing with him. Lewis is not only a first-class conductor, but was an engaging host for the proceedings, offering musical insights and anecdotes that were as entertaining as they were informative. These spring concerts feature Lewis conducting Bella Voce in a program juxtaposing pieces by seventeenth-century British composer Henry Purcell and twentieth-century British composer Benjamin Britten, with the premise that both were innovators of their respective times who managed to define a uniquely British sound while still incorporating a wide variety of international elements into their styles. The program includes Britten’s "Hymn to St. Cecilia," "Chorale After an Old French Carol" and "Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam," while Purcell anthems to be performed—all accompanied by organist Paul Nicholson—include "Blow Up the Trumpet in Zion," "O God, Thou Art My God," "Hear My Prayer, O Lord," "Man That is Born of a Woman," "Thou Knowest, Lord, the Secret of our Hearts," "Lord, How Long Wilt Thou be Angry?" and "I was Glad," composed for the coronation of King James II in 1685.
Sounds a lot like Christmas
Chicago Sun-Times December 4, 2006
DOROTHY ANDRIES
Only last year the a cappella ensemble Bella Voce was in danger of disappearing, due to the retirement of its longtime conductor and artistic director Anne Heider. But Saturday night the 20 voices of its members filled St. James Episcopal Cathedral, heralding Christmas with glorious song in the first of its holiday concerts.
Its new conductor Andrew Lewis, music director of the Elgin Choral Union, selected a program of contemporary composers who have departed in some way from the traditional Western Classical or Romantic style, generously laced with works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. That continues Heider's tradition, though this appearance revealed Lewis to have even more idiosyncratic tastes.
The concert was bracketed by William Walton's carols, opening with "All This Time" and concluding with "What Cheer?" in acknowledgment of this 20th century British composer's skill in writing for voice.
Bella Voce sang two Latin hymns by Swedish composer Otto Olsson, also from the 20th century. The first, "Canticum Simeonis," had a monastic sound; soloist Blake Adams was the cantor and sang without vibrato, while chant portions were sung with the utmost delicacy. In the second, "Ave Maris Stella," the music poured out like honey, rich and shining, with soprano voices soaring above the altos, tenors and basses, like light through darkness.
Particularly powerful was "Lux Aurumque" by 36-year-old American composer Eric Whitaker. The off-center harmonies began quietly, growing in intensity, dawning on us like daybreak, then suddenly the sound dissolved. It did not fade, it actually disintegrated, then, miraculously, came together again.
Textured, almost disturbing dissonance also was found in "Bogoroditse Dyevo" by Alfred Schnittke, another 20th century composer. The sound was woolly and dense, arresting and beautiful.
It would not be Christmas without "O Magnum Mysterium," given in versions by Tomas Luis de Victoria from the 16th century and the living American composer Morten Lauridsen.
British composer John Rutter, whose music or arrangements seem to be in every Christmas concert these days, was represented by "I Wonder as I Wander" and "There is a Flower." Kathryn McClure was soloist in the first and Laura Lynch in the second, demonstrating the quality of the individual voices in this elegant ensemble.