music:: MARCH 16, 2005

Children’s choir, symphony premiere ‘life-changing’ work

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

They can’t wait until Saturday … but they have to.

A once-in-a-lifetime experience awaits everyone involved when the 82-voice MSU Children’s Chorus joins forces with the Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra for the fifth MasterWorks concert of the season. They’re unveiling a major commissioned piece by Canadian composer John Burge, a sweet, savage and ethereal opus that reaches boldly for the face of the infinite.

‘Voices of Angels’
World premiere by the MSU Children’s Choir and the Greater Lansing Symphony Orchestra at 8 p.m. Saturday, March 19, at the Wharton Center. Tickets range from $14-$40. Call (517) 487-5001 for reservations.Of course, nobody knows exactly what will happen when the children’s peanut butter hits conductor Gustav Meier’s chocolate Saturday night — it’s a world premiere, after all.

But consider this: Choir director Mary Alice Stollak says she’s more excited about this piece than anything the group has yet done.

“It’s life-changing,” she marvels. “I’m a different conductor than I was before.”

Coming from the leader of a group that’s sung “Carmina Burana” with the Detroit Symphony, represented the United States at last year’s World Choral Symposium, and appeared on one of The New York Times’ top classical discs of 2004, those are words with weight.

After premiering ‘Angels’ Voices’ with the Lansing Symphony this Saturday, the MSU Children’s Chorus will take the massive work to Carnegie Hall April 3.

The new piece is called “Angels’ Voices,” but both Stollak and composer Burge declare emphatically the angels involved are not the Hallmark kind. (Burge prefers the title “Angels’ Voices” over the sugar-added variant “Voices of Angels.”) The 22-minute suite is a huge do-up of four intense poems by English and American poets. The texts dramatically set infinite qualities — nature’s beauty, peacefulness, freedom, the starry sky — against worldly cares like heartache, insomnia, prison and death. At the core of the music is the heart-rending tug of war between the innocence of children and the broken world of grown-ups.

One verse (“God sendeth his angels sleep”) hits Stollak especially hard. “It’s the most majestic thing we have ever sung,” she declares. “In rehearsal, as embarrassing as it is, my eyes well up. I can’t imagine what it’ll be like with an orchestra.”

The only man who knows the answer to that is, thankfully, happy to tell. “It’s not necessarily a feel-good piece, but a piece with a spiritual core,” says Burge, a fortyish composer and poetry lover who works and teaches in Kingston, Ontario. “I don’t pull any punches in the music. The texts really make you think about life on earth, and how we deal with our own problems. When the music needs to be dissonant and expressive, it is. When it needs to be lyrical and have a sense of flow, it does.”

Burge relishes any chance to write for large forces. “This piece has a huge brass section” — the gleaming hardware is also needed for Tchaikovsky’s brass-laden Symphony No. 5, which will climax the evening — “and I’ve got three percussionists playing a huge assortment of instruments.”

The composer has never even met Stollak, yet both independently singled out the same moment of the score to describe at passionate length: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s lush couplet “The infinite meadows of heaven,” which comprises the fourth movement. “At the end,” Stollak says, “the children go up the scale, singing ‘ah,’ until they hold eight notes in a cluster that is absolutely crystalline.” She says the “ah” then narrows to an uncanny hum, “making you feel that you’re really part of the constellations.”

But Stollak only knows half the story. Burge singles out the same moment, describing it from the orchestra’s point of view. “I wanted to create the starry sky, and the stars turning into an infinite meadow of flowers,” he says. “I use harp and vibraphone, and at the end I bring in wind chimes. And I just know that when the wind chimes come, and the choir splits and they hold this chord, and the orchestra fades out, it should be quite fabulous!”

Stollak says the older teens in her group (the choristers range from fourth to seventh grade) particularly love another of the suite’s texts, “Iron bars do not a prison make” by 16th-century poet Richard Lovelace.

“They do?” Burge asks. “That’s good, because to create the effect of prison, the children have to sing ‘almost’ in canon” (meaning they have to weave a multi-part round, like “Row, row, row your boat”). But the canon, explains Burge, is barely “off,” making it devilishly difficult to sing. “The idea is that they’re locked in, they’re creating a choral prison,” he says. “If they’re into that, then they’re working really hard.”

The MSU children have been around the world and back with Stollak, singing everything from gospel to Bach to heart-rending songs by concentration camp victims, but this music is turning them on in a special way. “The children’s demeanor in rehearsals changes significantly when we rehearse this work,” Stollak says. “There’s an intensity, a concentration, that takes over the rehearsal room. Their faces become animated in a way that I have never experienced. The music comes out of their eyes.”

Stollak will conduct the piece herself at Carnegie Hall on April 3, with a gang of excited MSU kids. “The Williamston Women’s Choir will join us,” she says. “It’s a chance to do this again, and who knows when we’ll get another?”

In rehearsal, Stollak has found that her students respond generously to even the most “adult” portions of the music. “When they sing ‘the burdening grief, the burdening pain,’ in the fourth movement, their faces become so intense,” she says.

“We make the mistake that children are not able to understand these things, but they have their own griefs,” she says. “Maybe they’ve lost a grandparent they loved very much. Again I’m convinced if you give them the best literature, they’ll respond in kind.”

Burge agrees that it doesn’t hurt to go through a bit of a wringer for the sake of great art. “I’ve tried to aim the music experience at as high a level as possible,” he says. “By the time it gets to the end it should be emotionally inspiring and draining.”

Burge says it’s “by far the exception” for a city’s symphony to work with a local chorus to premiere an ambitious piece. “To have the symphony and choir combine to do this is an incredible community-building event,” he says. “It’s so wonderful the children’s choir has an opportunity to perform with the symphony orchestra, and that they’re bold and courageous enough to undertake a brand-new commission.”

Incredibly, the chorus will only get two one-hour rehearsals with the orchestra. “That’s about par for the course,” observes Burge, who says he’s not worried. “In my experience, when choirs work with an orchestra, they’re almost over-prepared.”

The concert will open with two excerpts from Georges Bizet’s “Carmen,” transitioning to the world of children with the “Evening Prayer” from Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” The Burge premiere will close out the first half.

Sorry Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony, better luck next time — when the Detroit Symphony comes to the Wharton in May.