My daughter and I joined an overflowing crowd eager to hear Toronto Beach Chorale with Mississauga Chamber Singers and their guests in a jam-packed Kingston Road United Church.
The short pieces in the first half of the concert with introductory remarks from Mervin Fick, conductor & Music Director of Toronto Beach Chorale & Mississauga Chamber Singers, served as explanation & preparation for the big piece in the second half, Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana.
Don’t mistake this for a dry history lesson. We heard different types of music both to instruct us and to delight us. These aural appetizers for Orff’s big composition from the 1930s prepared us for a work that is a curious mixture of old and new, simultaneously modern yet employing a medieval text. And it’s among the most popular works of the last hundred years.
The concert featured not just the 39 members of Toronto Beach Chorale, but also the 27 member Mississauga Chamber Singers, TorQ Percussion Quartet (Richard Burrows, Adam Campbell, Jamie Drake & Daniel Morphy), pianists Ronald Greidanus & Adolfo De Santis, and soloists Nune Ananyan, soprano, Benjamin Done, tenor and Alexander Hajek, baritone.
In a choral concert it’s usually soloists who get the glory, so I thought I could at least lead with the photos of the choirs.
Here are the participants in the concert, featuring Carmina Burana in a version for two pianos and percussion ensemble rather than a full orchestra. But don’t mistake that for small, as the sound, especially the big choral moments, were still vivid and powerful inside the Kingston Road United Church given its lively acoustic.
Carmina Burana is a curious mix of old and new, at times an evocation of a simpler, older way of music making, even if there is still a modernist edge to some of the climaxes & sonorities. The first half of the concert assembled a series of possible influences upon Orff, creative threads that were coming to fruition in the century before he composed the work.
We heard a tight performance, the conductor’s tempi bold and energetic, among the quickest I have heard: very much as I like it. The smaller ensemble (two pianos & four percussionists) allowed that kind of quickness, perhaps more flexibility and control than could easily be achieved with the large orchestra Orff originally prescribed. Perhaps this performance used the reduction created in the 1950s by Wilhelm Killmayer, although to be honest I couldn’t really see the players & their instruments, but only glimpsed singers during their solos and the choirs standing at the back.
The soloists were a pleasure to hear, Alex Hajek’s warm baritone and Nune Ananyan’s clear soprano delightful. I was especially impressed with Benjamin Done’s swan-song, a piece often involving falsetto or some squawked grotesquerie, that he managed to sing with his own beautiful voice.
This was the last concert of the season for both the Toronto Beach Chorale and the Mississauga Chamber Singers. To see what they’re up to you can find them on social media or on their websites:
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