For some years now, I’ve been wanting to hear Antioch – a crack professional-level mini-choir from New York that’s been performing in Piccolo Spoleto’s Choral Artists Series for five or six years now. Quite a few of their ten singers are alums of the Westminster Choir that we hear in the big dance every year. Folks keep telling me how terrific they are, and are surprised that a choral nut like me doesn’t know them. Somehow, in the giddy crush of the two festivals, our paths have never crossed. But I finally got my chance on Saturday (05/26), when they appeared at St. Philips Episcopal Church – in an absolutely ravishing program of mostly modern a cappella music.
The first of three phases – “English Music for a Queen” offered two terrific pieces – one old and one new. Sir Michael Tippet’s quasi-Elizabethan Dance, Clarion Air is one of his best choral pieces. But I enjoyed early Renaissance composer William Cornysh’s Salve Regina – a hymn to the Virgin Mary, “Queen of Heaven.” – even more. There’s nothing like florid Renaissance polyphony to show off a choir’s precision and purity of sound … qualities that Antioch has in spades. I fell in love with their soaring, plangent sopranos in this one.
Then it was on to an emerging work by the contemporary American master Morten Lauridsen: his Madrigali: Six “Fire-Songs” on Italian Renaissance Poems. These engaging and passionate pieces are mostly about the painful side of love – like the temporary insanity you go through when it’s unrequited. So the music is often restless and moody, with agonized outbursts and exquisite use of dissonance. It’s the flip-side of a composer whose music has been mostly pegged as serene and dreamy. This stuff is also beastly difficult – but Antioch tossed it all off without a hitch. This was definitely one o’ them multiple-eargasm pieces.
And it ended – too soon – with three “American Jazz Standards” – spiffy arrangements of I Got Rhythm, Blue Moon, and Over the Rainbow. It made for a nice, light dessert after the heavier main dishes. It all adds up to further proof that Piccolo needn’t always take a back seat to her big sister. Oh – and I got their CD, too.
