Enchanting Visions of Heaven

Visions of Heaven

Friday 28 June 2024, St Paul's Cathedral

‘Enchanting’ was the word I heard as a capacity audience began to disperse after this singularly memorable concert. The conjunction of the Dunedin Organ Festival 2024 with the city’s Puaka Matariki Festival made for some inspired programming, which showed to great effect the range and qualities of the Cathedral organ and of that other many-voiced instrument, City Choir Dunedin. 

The central three of six choral pieces were each followed by an organ solo, beautifully played by a trio of organists: Max Toth produced glorious rivers of sound in the serene, flowing In Paradisum of Theodore Dubois; See-am Thompson in Le Banquet Celeste by Messiaen was similarly attuned to the work’s fluid and surprising harmonies; and Jeremy Woodside was particularly impressive playing Whitbourn’s Apollo, with its dramatic range of effects, evoking Apollo as the god of light, music and the Sun, and also as the name of the vehicle for the famous spaceflight in 1969 that took the first humans to the moon.

The celestial theme pulled everything together. For the opening item, Stars, by Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds, an ethereal atmosphere was created by some singers playing shifting chords on tuned wineglasses. This special music underpinned and extended the piece, Sara Teasdale’s words and other vocalizations merging with the resonating glasses to suggest something beyond the present moment, like the mythical ‘music of the spheres’. The merged effects of the chords in Stars also bore out something its composer has said: ‘For me, harmony is most important – how it flows and becomes a new harmony. The melodic line is secondary.’

The contrast could not be greater with the style of the second piece, Bairstow’s Blessed City, Heavenly Salem, a heightened version of a classic Anglican hymn, with strong melodic lines. Where Stars was gently appealing to the imagination, Bairstow’s anthem (based on a 7th-century Latin text) presented a definitive image of ‘the heavenly city, new Jerusalem’ as a creation of ‘the heavenly Architect’, and almost as solid as the earthly one.

The choir showed itself easily able to move from one mode to the other, helped by the vague, mysterious soundscape of Stars and the emphatic and nearly overwhelming organ accompaniment to the Bairstow. Conductor David Burchell and organist Jeremy Woodside expertly managed the hymn’s changing dynamics, taking the choir forward to a dramatic climax then, soon after, allowing a tranquil space for soprano soloist Cathy Sim to reach us above the quietened chorus. In this work, as throughout the programme, light and shade, power and humility, were each given their moment and meaning, and the transitions were seamless between different subjects and moods.

As befits a winter occasion, communications were very clear on the night. There was no problem with diction, for instance, in Bairstow’s hymn. In a work projecting confidence and certainty, the singers articulating the text had only to match the spirit of the music in its sense of declaration and purpose – as of course they continued to do in Haydn’s triumphant The Heavens are Telling, from his oratorio Creation. This much clarity was to be expected in traditional mode, but nor was there a diction problem in Stars or any other of the modern pieces. The programme gave us the words for all the choral items, except for the Bairstow which was represented by two verses only. The message couldn’t possibly be missed.

This was certainly true for the moving anthem by Edgar Bainton, And I saw a new heaven, based on Revelations 21: 1-4. For both the Haydn and the Bainton, many in the audience might have known the texts already, and even if they didn’t, the words carry a sense of rightness because the composer has given musical form to what are very simple poetic cadences. This piece draws you in with its driving momentum; indeed it would be hard not to be carried along by the repeating waves of crescendi, emotionally charged as they are. But intensity is not attained by simple repetition; rather by contrast with other passages at the other end of the volume scale. The performance was well rounded by these tonal variations.

The last two of six substantial anthems broadened the theme of Visions of Heaven from a specifically Christian understanding to an appreciation of the immensity of the universe that stargazers see, wherever they are viewing it from. Continuing the theme of a harmony that is other-worldly, and a humility that is engendered by the experience of awe, a piece by award-winning New Zealand composer David Hamilton prepared the way for a final item specifically from te ao Māori.

Hamilton, in The Stars Above the Sea, from his seven-movement choral work A Celestial Map of the Sky (2020), has set words by Amos Russel Wells (1862-1933) who, though writing in the Christian era, approaches a universal view: 

Far, far away one mystery greets 

Another vast and high, 

The infinite of waters meets 

The infinite of sky. 

A sense of distance and height was beautifully conveyed by the solo soprano line: ‘The stars are singing hymns of calm / Above the sea’s unrest.’ And Burchell’s playing – of his own organ arrangement of Hamilton’s setting for orchestra – made for some thrilling virtuosic flights in an already complex score, conducted this time by Mark Anderson.

The haunting and mysterious mood of many of the night’s offerings was confirmed and continued in the final item, Chris Artley’s compelling Matariki, scored for six parts – SATB plus mezzo and baritone – and sung a cappella. In Artley’s dense, diffused texture there were no solos, individual voices being subsumed in the whole. The main musical effect, again, was of merging harmonies rather than separate melodies, often with dissonance sustained in slow-moving chords. Matariki, which won the open category of Compose Aotearoa in 2020, was mesmerizing: the highlight of the evening for me. As throughout the programme, the musicians themselves seemed captivated by the spirit of the message they were asked to convey.

Review by Helen White, NZ Opera News, August-October Spring 2024