Singing of the sacred

PSU’s Chamber Choir, Portland’s Vox Femina and the Man Choir will combine voices Friday night at St. Mary’s Cathedral for the spirituality-based concert Shattered Faith.

The program explores the topic of faith with music ranging from Bach to Bollywood. Challenging emotionally for the audience and technically demanding for the singers, the varied pieces aim for more than light entertainment.

As Chamber Choir conductor Dr. Ethan Sperry explained, sometimes art requires more than casual attention from the audience. The rewards can make for deeper appreciation.

“Choirs traditionally do concerts of sacred music because there has been so much great sacred music written for them,” Sperry said. “This is a concert of mostly sacred music, but not on the topic you usually think of.”

Sperry explained that the dialogue on faith in our community should start addressing the moments when people’s faith is tested, and “not just religious faith, but faith in each other, faith in society.” He believes Portland’s reputation as a liberal city lends itself to a concert with an edgy theme of this sort.

Although the concert will take place in a cathedral, the program avoids pigeonholing faith in purely religious terms.

“We’ll be able to communicate with so many more people because these texts [in the program] cover so many different parts of life,” said Vox Femina co-conductor Kevin Lambert.

Two of the pieces derive from a biblical text called O vos omnes, from the Book of Lamentations.

The first is from Argentinean composer Alberto Ginastera. Sperry described it as “incredibly aggressive, as it tries to get the feeling of Jerusalem being destroyed due to God’s wrath.”

The second, by Italian Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, is sadder and more contemplative.

“Gesualdo was a rare composer. He didn’t work for the church. He was sort of a crazy nobleman, a young prince who wrote music as a hobby,” Sperry said. “His music was some of the most complex music written during the Renaissance.”

The men’s chorus will sing a chain gang song called “Great God Almighty,” a spiritual in the black gospel tradition.

“It’s about prisoners watching a guard trying to kill a slave and screaming, ‘Great God Almighty!’” Sperry said.

Sperry’s arrangement of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” explores another aspect of the concert’s theme. When people fall in love, Sperry said, “it’s almost like a religious experience until it all goes wrong. It’s about the faith you put in love, which can get shattered as well.”

Two pieces by the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis explore yet another aspect of shattered faith.

The selections from a larger work titled Autumn Landscapes lulls audiences with its melodic beauty—until they listen to the lyrics. In the vision of Tormis, autumn is a metaphor for death. The piece is about “dealing with this knowledge that fall inherently is about taking everything that was alive in summer and watching it die,” Lambert said.

Sometimes the sheer sound of a piece trumps its lyrical content when those who arrange a concert program choose what to include.

“We have a very strange piece for the women’s choir by a composer named Stephen Hatfield. It’s called Überlebensgroß, which means ‘larger than life,’” Sperry said. “It has no words at all, but it involves women slamming bamboo poles on the floor and all kinds of crazy things. It’s an overwhelming, difficult experience.”

In contrast, the Bollywood-inspired song Balleilakka, by Slumdog Millionaire composer A. R. Rahman, provides joyful relief from the gloom.

“It’s not like this is going to be the sort of experience where we just keep shattering your faith over and over again,” said Man Choir co-conductor Erick Lichte. “There are these moments where some little bits of resolution and hope and peacefulness have got to come back in our lives, too.”

Rather than address a specific period in history, the Shattered Faith program seeks to address, through music, how we react in troubled times, during which our faith is tested every day.

“One of the things I like about Ethan Sperry’s programming—and this may be the unfortunate thing—but you could have done this concert a hundred years ago, fifty years ago, ten years ago, a hundred years from now, and everything that we’re saying is always going to be applicable,” Lichte said.