Washington Classical Review

Christian Lane conducted the Emmanuel Choir Sunday in Baltimore. Photo: Magdaline Kovalchuk

Occasionally you go to a concert that restores your faith—not necessarily in a god, but in music, in people, and in art to ponder the unanswerable questions.

Sunday’s concert by the Emmanuel Choir at Baltimore’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church was enough to restore one’s faith in choral repertoire. The concert was curated to literally make a musical statement about America, replete with some extraordinary renderings of classic repertoire, equally phenomenal new American music, and old homegrown  standards. Not everything in the concert was equally well-rendered, but the average standard was exemplary, and at the concert’s peaks, stunning.

If one could name a single highlight of the concert, it was a staggeringly beautiful rendering of the Randall Thompson Alleluia. The choir’s harmonies absolutely glowed with overtones while maintaining complete linear clarity and timbral blend. It was, quite simply, the most sublime rendering a listener can ever expect to hear of perhaps the central work in America’s choral repertoire.

In Samuel Barber’s setting of Agnus Dei (the choral arrangement of the famous Barber Adagio for Strings), the tempo was unusually fleet, which is understandable considering the difficulty in sustaining vocal support through its brief span. The chorus, as ever in this concert, stayed completely on pitch, but they could not quite maintain the same seraphic halo in the loud passages and sang swelling passages with a force that was perhaps inappropriate for such a fragile piece of music.

Among the newer works, the highlights came in works by Caroline Shaw and Joel Thompson.

Shaw’s “Her beacon hand beckons” is a movement for unaccompanied chorus from her larger work, To the Hands.

Shaw is by now a beloved figure to choral singers and vocal mavens, and her music in no way disappointed. The chorus acquitted itself magnificently, and the blend and intonation of their no-vibrato straight tone was so perfect that one could only wish they kept employing straight tone through the entire concert.

Joel Thompson’s A prayer for deliverance is based on text from Psalm 13. Each singer in this sixteen-member choir had their own vocal line, upheld by all to ideal intonation and breath support. The music seemed practically symphonic in form, content and tension. The care which the choir lavished upon this work was obvious from first bar to last. 

Works like Kevin Siegfried’s “O come freedom” and ‘”Visions of glory” by Trevor Weston, while worthy efforts, seemed somewhat less ambitious.

Among the arrangements of familiar standards and hymns, those that stood out were “Shenandoah” (arranged by Thomas Hewitt Jones) and “Deep River” (rendered by Gerre Hancock), both unorthodox and even bizarre in the best possible way: The adaptation of “Lift every voice and sing” was also moving in its simplicity.

Christian Lane is a minimalist conductor: setting pulses, rarely shaping phrases in the moment, letting a collection of great singers do what they do best. One might occasionally wish for a more active shaping hand, but one cannot argue with the vast majority of his results.

At its best, this was a stunning concert that can restore your faith that music and choirs still matter both to America and to the future.