It was just a hair past 8:30 on Friday night, and Dan Shaw was feeling the spirit of Gabriel Fauré moving slowly through him.
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, members of the New Haven Oratorio Choir (NHOC) near whisper-sang, their voices even-keeled and measured as they breathed the Latin in and out, a low vocal tide rising with it.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis. Shaw moved his hands slowly, fingers gliding through the air.
Eternal rest grant to them, O Lord, / and may perpetual light shine upon them.
It was the group’s customary winter concert, bringing bright aural light to the early dark of New England winter as around 60 listeners packed the Church of the Redeemer on Whitney Avenue. But this year something was different, showing the group can still evolve as it enters its 54th season. From the front of the church, a chamber orchestra accompanied choir members, lifting 30 voices up on a bed of strings and piano.
No piece, perhaps, better personifies Shaw’s yoking of forward movement, the NHOC’s cautious but eager foray into new material, and the memory of former member Robert Killheffer, than Fauré‘s Requiem. Working through the latter half of the mid-19th century and beginning of the 20th, Fauré started his Requiem during what is known as France’s Belle Époque, a period of relative prosperity and innovation between the massive, nation-gutting Franco-Prussian War and World War II. Composed between 1887 and 1890, the Requiem distances itself from more traditional versions written for requiem masses (intended to remember the dead), entirely omitting the “Dies Irae” or fiery, grim “Day of Wrath” from its finished text. The result — a reflection of Fauré‘s own liberal interpretation and translation of the Latin, and deep sense of musical balance — is a piece that reminds listeners of the existence of hell without ever seeming to suggest that they might end up there.
That musical spirit, long interred in Paris’s Passy Cemetery, ran through the choir and orchestra Friday night. Savoring the words as they sang, members of the choir swayed slowly, some closing their eyes around the verses Libera me, Domine, de morte aeterna in die illa tremenda (Deliver me, O Lord, from eternal death / in that terrible day) and grinning, just a little, as soloists Jason Thoms and Sarah Reed sang out their pleas for restful eternity. Beneath them, the orchestra plunged deep into pits of darkness and soared to high salvation, embracing the “great step forward for the New Haven Oratorio Choir” that Shaw, the group’s artistic director, expressed in the evening’s program.
If the concert ended with a first, it began with one too. For the first time during Shaw’s tenure, two of his original compositions set the evening in motion, transitioning from a Mozart-esque Ave Vernum Corpus to a meditation on the clean, austere beauty of Jennifer Tibbetts’s Come Away Death (also performed during the concert) and Sara Teasdale’s century-old “The Falling Star.”
In the second, Shaw willed an unending canvas of night sky — or maybe Teasdale’s words, or maybe both — into the church, stars winking one by one as voice parts split and swelled, comprising whole depths of planetary knowledge. He’d harnessed it, and wasn’t going to let it go anytime soon.
“This is a portrait of unmoving stars in the sky,” Shaw wrote in a program to accompany the piece. “You need to listen into the stillness.”
