Lucy Gellman Photo
“Give me an A,” Dan Shaw commanded from the wicker seat of a high-backed chair. “Come on, now.” It was a minute past eight o’ clock at night, and by his watch, rehearsal was already running too late.
A few tenors shifted from their places on the risers. New Haven Oratorio Choir (NHOC) President Mary Clark and soloist Kathryn Aaron shared a quick, smiling glance over their brimming binders, both of them shifting their eyes toward Shaw as they prepared to warm up. Mouths opened. Pupils dilated. The most unified A that Whitney Avenue had heard all day came pouring out.
“Beautiful,” Shaw said. He was ready to get the show on the road. His hands fluttered upward; his body leaned back ever so slightly. On cue, the choir broke into Maddalena Casulana’s “O Notte, O Cielo, O Mar.”
So began Wednesday evening’s rehearsal for “The Joy of Creation,” the NHOC’s spring concert scheduled for this Saturday evening at 8 p.m., at the Church of the Redeemer at 185 Cold Spring St. For the first time in the choir’s history, the program will consist entirely of women composers, presenting 10 works by women from the 11th through 20th centuries. Coming off a particularly good Great Give year — $2,560 from 40 donors — the group is getting excited about the program and the new and different listenership it might bring in.
Made possible by an Alfred Nash Patterson grant and funding from the Community Foundation of Greater New Haven, the program, conceived by Shaw to feature figures “greatly underrepresented in chorale repertoire,” takes on some of the most challenging work that the group has performed yet. That the pieces are by women, or that the concert fortuitously falls on Mother’s Day weekend, is a kind of aural gravy that transcends the boundaries of time, sex, and gender.
“I’ve performed all kinds of music, and here … every single piece is brand new, requiring hard work and study. It’s a really eye-opening and fantastic experience to learn this music, to see how special it is, to share it with our audiences. You’re not going to see this anywhere else. It’s music that’s really worth hearing and that’s exciting to us. One of our goals is to present music in a more intimate way, and also to promote new composers and new music. It will feel comfortable, but challenging,” said Clark.
“We’re doing very challenging music. To me, that’s what’s most important. It just happens that they’re all women composers,” added Anish Kurian, who joined the group last fall.
That doesn’t mean the singular nature of the program, which has been painstakingly curated and rehearsed at this point, takes a backseat. As NHOC Membership Coordinator and typo catcher extraordinaire Gretchen Pritchard writes in the program notes, there is something utterly refreshing about this all-star, yet unknown, lineup.
“Simply by experiencing, in order, this selection of choral works by women, one can get a sense of the progress and setbacks of women who sought ‘the joy of creation’ by composing music within the social and cultural settings in which they found themselves,” her entry reads.
Clark, Shaw, and Pritchard’s excitement for the breathtakingly beautiful works, which flow from smooth and round to modern and whimsical, is contagious. When the program kicks off with an earlier-than-early-modern, all-woman chant by Hildegard von Bingen (1098 – 1179), the church fills with a deeply sacrosanct melody that has voices rising in unison, floating toward the heavens. “O Notte, O Cielo, O Mar,” on which the group began Wednesday, has temporal strains listeners might recognize from something like “Nuper Rosarium Flores,” but ventures beyond them fearlessly, resulting in the kind of piece that leaves you forgetting to breathe.
Ingeborg Bronsart’s “Osterlied” walks through the church gently on the still-soft balls of its feet, wrapping the rows in unexpected bolts of velvet and silk. Ann Sheppard Mounsey Bartholomew’s “Tell Me, Where Is Fancy Bred?” takes a whimsical spin on a Shakespearean question. Florence Marshall’s “To Sea! The Calm Is O’er” teases out gorgeous, exhilarating vocal layers that the choir has fun with. And selections from Ruth Henderson’s Missa Brevis are enough to bring the listener, whatever level of devout they may be, clear to their knees.
Wednesday’s magic — soon to be Saturday’s — is a serious labor of love on the choir’s part. Credit for this falls largely to Clark, who serves as the vocal and administrative glue that keeps the group together, and to Shaw, who is a driven but gentle taskmaster. Peppering his critiques with “Shawisms” like “I want Baroque notes, not Renaissance notes,” he has more than the group’s respect (and occasional fear). He has their trust.
“I’m trying to bolster general choral skills in parallel to learning the music, so that people can become less dependent on me and more naturally connected to me,” Shaw said. “My job is to stay focused and try to keep the detail and nuance alive by the way I move my hands and stare at people. I’m very happy with how things are going. One of my goals of being a conductor is I want to make people happy, and I know that this group breeds some happiness. That’s the idea — for the audience, and of course, the choir — and I feel that that’s working.”
“Growth feels good in a choir,” he added. “We don’t know yet how far we can go, and it’s exciting. It’s an adventure, and it’s definitely a team effort.”
The NHOC is a community that needs the music as much as the music needs them. While discussing room for improvement in the program over chicken wings and cups of clam chowder at Archie Moore’s — a weekly Wednesday tradition — members shared how the program captures a larger spirit of the group: a community of vocal kin, bound by the joy of creation and delivery.
“It’s a combination of an escape from my everyday life, a release from the day to day, and to be able to reconnect with culture and music and that side of my life that I don’t get to do on a day-to-day basis. It is a great community of people to really be with,” said Connie English, NHOC Treasurer. “They become great friends, and people that you share something that’s so special to do with.”
“It’s what draws me here, year after year,” she added. “That’s a great feeling.”
To find out more about the New Haven Oratorio Choir, visit its website or Facebook page.
Thanks for a lovely article.
Just one correction (besides the three typos I caught and you've corrected).
We do not fear Dan, not even occasionally. We absolutely and totally respect and trust him, but there's no fear in there.
I've never once, in the three and a half years he's been with us, seen him lose his cool. Naturally, he often has to criticize us, but he does it with unfailing good will, tact and humor. He never puts anybody down or embarrasses them; he's never snide or sarcastic. It's one of the many things that make NHOC such a special and fun group to belong to.