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Kansas City's Online Journal of the Performing Arts

We are witnesses to the birth of a new art form - the new music emerging from the fusion of Western classical music with Asian has captured my ear - and my heart.  This winter The Friends of Chamber Music brought Chanticleer and the Shanghai String Quartet to Kansas City on their world premiere tour of the stunningly remarkable work, From the Path of Beauty by internationally acclaimed composer and UMKC Professor of Composition, Chen Yi. 

Charles Bruffy, Artistic Director of the Kansas City Chorale, has his finger on the pulse of this emerging musical language/art form, as well. 

Me-Na-Ri, an exquisitely haunting piece by Korean composer, Hyo-won Woo, opened the final concert of the season of the Grammy Award-winning Kansas City Chorale last Tuesday night.  It was a brilliant choice that set the tone of sublime beauty and perfection for the evening of heavy-hitting choral masterworks.  If one of the benchmarks of excellence in programming is how quickly and completely the opening selection draws the audience into the present, Bruffy and the Kansas City Chorale scored a perfect ten.

The high-vaulted and spacious round knave of the Church of the Nativity proved to be an excellent acoustical partner for the work.  Members of the Chorale sang in three groups placed strategically behind the audience around the outer rim to bathe the listeners in sound emanating from seemingly every direction.  Me-Na-Ri means 'an echo in the mountains' in Korean, and that is a perfect description of the effect the Chorale achieved.  It was uncanny to hear the perfectly matched pitches and tonal colors that were produced antiphonally in echoes so purely matched that it took a moment to register which group was singing.  Just when I thought it couldn't get more beautiful, trance-inducing meditative clusters of chords gave way to the haunting, limpid solo voice of soprano, Beth Munce, whose timbre and inflections were eerily those of an ancient wooden pipe of pan, dipping and wailing a song of sorrow.

Still singing, they processed in single lines to the front to continue Woo's piece in traditional choir formation, with the men emitting sounds similar to the deep throat singing heard recently by the Tibetan Monks at Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral.  Near its conclusion, the choir, singing, processed back to the outer rims of the knave down five different aisles, treating listeners to yet another surround-sound experience as they filed past.  That Bruffy factors in the acoustical properties of the concert venue in his performances, adjusting dynamics, tempi and a variety of unseen remedies to utilize the strengths and to work around weaknesses is another hallmark of his genius in delivering consistently world-class concerts.

Ms. Woo, a leading composer of Korea, is engaged as full-time composer for the professional Incheon City Chorale.  This August, the Kansas City Chorale under Bruffy's direction will perform her Me-Na-Ri at the Incheon Choral Festival in Seoul as one of only six choirs invited worldwide to participate.  It would be a valuable contribution to the body of choral recordings for the KCC to record this beautiful work on a future CD.

The traditional African-American spiritual There is a balm in Gilead followed in a sumptuously rich setting by American composer, René Clausen.  The Chorale made a meal of it with their warm choral blend, capped by the pure, plaintive coloratura soprano voice of soloist, Sarah Tannehill that ascended gracefully above the chorus. 

In 2008, the Kansas City Chorale together with their sister choir, the Phoenix Chorale, both under the artistic direction of Charles Bruffy, commissioned a Mass for their combined choirs from American choral composer, René Clausen.  The world premiere of the work was intended to be presented by both choirs, but as Bruffy noted in his comments, the choirs' recent tours to New York City and elsewhere made the additional trip for the Phoenix Chorale to Kansas City not feasible that evening.  To sweeten the let-down, Bruffy shared that the work being premiered that evening would be the world premiere of the work as it currently stands in four movements.  However, next year, he promised that both choirs will present together the new work with the addition of the fifth 'Sanctus' movement in what will become the world premiere of the complete new work.  Just another perk of attending live performances: to experience the cutting-edge delivery of great music in the midst of it being created.   

Clausen's Mass for Double Choir merits the attention of the international choral community, where time will likely find it placed high in rank.  The Clausen trademarks of tonal clusters and cascading layers of evocative dissonance were at hand, but this work offers a depth of compositional nuance that surpasses his previous body of work.  Open octave passages provided moments for the KC Chorale to emanate their perfectly honed intonation and matched timbres. My favorite moment came in the 'Credo' on the treatment of the text Et resurrexit tertia (on the third day He rose again) in which the artistry of the choir expressed to perfection the crazy excitement and magic of the moment when Christ rose again, expressed in Clausen's vision.

It was a world-class performance.  The National Endowment for the Arts has given a grant to enable a CD recording to be made featuring this and other works by Clausen to be featured on the Chandos label.  

The program continued, without intermission, with a humorous send-off of the PDQ Bach classic, The Seasonings.  Another of the evening's highlights followed that with the thrillingly beautiful opening bars of a piece premiered by the Kansas City Chorale in 2001, Leonardo Dreams of His Flying Machine.  The setting of the text 'releasing purchased pigeons one by one' was marvelous with renaissance cascades that aurally depicted birds flying away "into the golden Tuscan sunrise."  The program closed to the wickedly witty Farewell Overture by Kansas City composer Jean Belmont Ford, in which the choir intoned beautifully, and quite clearly their intent to call it a night - and it really was quite an exhilarating night, capped by an enthusiastic standing ovation.  To spend an evening with the Kansas City Chorale under the direction of Charles Bruffy is to experience some of the brightest sounds in the choral galaxy.

REVIEW
Kansas City Chorale
"Spring Pot Pourri"
Charles Bruffy, Music Director
Sunday, May 3, 2009
Redemptorist Church,
3333 Broadway, Kansas City, MOTuesday, May 5, 2009 (Reviewed)
Church of the Nativity
3800 W. 119^th St., Leawood, KS
www.kcchorale.org

By Gayle G. Hathorne

Classical and Vocal Contributor (Past writer)