Chapeau to Karen P. Thomas and Seattle Pro Musica, whose various sub-ensembles sang sublimely and with luminous grace in last night’s season finale program – and to Nathan Chan, the eloquent cello soloist in Caroline Shaw’s “Its motion keeps,” Roxanna Panufnik’s “All shall be well,” and Thomas’s own “The world is charged,” a striking new work for cello and choir that closed a radiant evening in the warmth of St James Cathedral.
So many signature Pro Musica moments in this gorgeous program — from the perfectly contoured phrasing of Biebl’s beloved “Ave Maria” and the subtle rhythmic lilt of Shaw to a wrenching account of Herbert Howells’s Requiem, an a cappella expression of private grief laid bare. Britten’s inspired Auden setting in “Hymn to Saint Cecilia” found clarity and proportion in Thomas’s lucid direction.
Thomas also revealed her compositional eloquence in “The world is charged” – an imaginative and affecting setting of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “God’s Grandeur,” which grapples with modern humanity’s estrangement from the natural world. I admired her musical evocation of Hopkins’s dense syntax and imagery, and of the quiet hope for renewal that pulses through the poem.
Filed under: choral music, review, Seattle Pro Musica
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 