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For devotees of the Atlanta classical music scene, the late Robert Shaw casts a Herculean shadow across the city’s musical tapestry. As music director and conductor of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra from 1967 until 1988 and the founder of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Chorus, he was a formidable but cherished force. Shaw’s career went a long way to making the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra into the powerhouse it is today.
Coro Vocati, one of Atlanta’s most prominent and distinguished chamber choirs, convened Saturday at Morningside Presbyterian Church for “Dear People,” a concert in honor of Shaw. For the Coro Vocati members — all of whom were influenced by Shaw directly or tangentially — it was an opportunity to share their touching memories of the man and showcase the extraordinary vocal capacities that were the generations-long fruits of his labor.
The extraordinary reach of Shaw’s influence is one that touches even myself: as a young man, my musical tastes were baptized into a love of classical music thanks in large part to the ASO’s recording of Mozart’s Requiem which Shaw conducted. With that connection I felt a particular draw to the evening’s proceedings and was touched by the deeply human recollections from speakers who painted Shaw as a man with intractably high standards and a stern commitment to excellence whose warm, fatherly demeanor made such lofty goals seem readily attainable.
The evening’s set opened with “Rejoice in the Lamb,” Op. 30 by Benjamin Britten. Although a fairly by-the-numbers sort of work, for an expert chorus, it nevertheless served to showcase the impressive range of their voices as well as the stellar acoustics of the chamber. Morningside Presbyterian, with its denominationally appropriate adherence to minimalism, however, was an ideal venue for the choir to shine.
Subsequent pieces were remarkable in their contrast and ran a wide gamut. “Fences” by modern American composer André Thomas is a fiendishly complicated work from a technical standpoint and the choir covered it with rigorous aplomb. There was, nevertheless, an emotional flatness to the performance, as though attention to technique had widely outshined any appeal to the human spirit.
This may have been due to the unexpected absence of conductor John Dickson, whose role was filled by a rotating roster of singers from the choir itself. Such a last-minute shake up is sure to impact any ensemble.
Gwyneth Walker’s “The Tree of Peace,” here conducted by Jeremiah Robinson, saw Coro Vocati once more firing on all cylinders. The piece was intricate and multilayered, yet still had moments of gorgeous harmony spread across the entire ensemble. Particular honors are owed to pianist John Crutchfield, whose deft command of the piece’s billowing arpeggiated runs gave the work the aura of progressive rock keyboard legends like Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman. It was here that the two halves of the Coro Vocati puzzle — the soulful and the virtuostic — finally merged and the evening became truly sublime.
“Sit and Dream” by Rosephanye Powell continued in the vein of modernism with a cool series of jazz turns. Blue notes and chromatic runs intersected as harmonies in ways that most choral writers would likely never think to include and most choral singers would be afraid to attempt. This is what “modern” composition ought to be — the intermingling of musical styles and eras into something new and vibrant.
With their wide reaching song selections and seemingly limitless technical capacity, the Coro Vocati demonstrated that the world of contemporary classical has much to offer to the open-minded listener.
The rest of the evening proceeded in much the same fashion with modern composers playing alongside the likes of Brahms, Bach, Haydn and Mendelssohn. What began as a warm nod to Robert Shaw had suddenly blossomed into a tour-de-force performance of outstanding virtuosity and vanguard modernism that entranced throughout. With “Dear People,” the Coro Vocati singers proved that Shaw’s kindhearted warmth in the face of extraordinary expectations endures even decades after his passing.
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Jordan Owen began writing about music professionally at the age of 16 in Oxford, Mississippi. A 2006 graduate of the Berklee College of Music, he is a professional guitarist, bandleader and composer. He is currently the lead guitarist for the jazz group Other Strangers, the power metal band Axis of Empires and the melodic death/thrash metal band Century Spawn.
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