Quire Cleveland

From Rome to Cleveland: Palestrina at St. Peter’s

Beverly Simmons — Sat, 25 May 2013 23:30:57 +0000

Guest conductor Jameson Marvin — Harvard’s choral director for 30+ years — brings his exuberant and inspiring directing to Quire Cleveland for a concert of music by the great Renaissance composer, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. Master of the papal choir at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome, Palestrina wrote music that is exquisitely beautiful and expressive. Quire Cleveland brings these glorious harmonies to Cleveland’s own historic St. Peter’s Church.

Saturday, May 25 at 7:30 pm
St. Peter Parish
East 17th Street & Superior Avenue East
Cleveland, OH 44114

The program features the Pope Marcellus Mass, his most famous composition, an important monument of 16th-century sacred music, as well as a stunning and enduring memorial to a pope who reigned for a mere 22 days. Interspersed among the movements of the Mass are some of Palestrina’s most exquisite motets (sacred works in Latin), many addressed to the Virgin Mary.

Everyone is welcome. These glorious sounds will certainly make your life more harmonious!

TICKETS: $20 general admission; $12 senior (65+);
$7 student (full-time); children (<18) FREE.

Free guarded parking. Wheelchair accessibility.

Preview: Quire Cleveland invites Jameson Marvin to conduct a Palestrina Fest on May 25

Beverly Simmons — Wed, 22 May 2013 02:39:29 +0000

Quire Cleveland will celebrate Memorial Day weekend with an all-Palestrina concert at Historic St. Peter’s Church in downtown Cleveland on Saturday evening, May 25. Quire’s founders, Ross W. Duffin and Beverly Simmons, have invited a distinguished choral specialist to guest conduct the professional ensemble for the occasion: Jameson Marvin, who retired last year after thirty-two years as director of choral activities at Harvard, including the Harvard Glee Club, the Harvard-Radcliffe Collegium Musicum and the Radcliffe Choral Society (Marvin’s last Cleveland appearance was with the Glee Club in March of 2010).

The Quire Cleveland invitation came about through personal connections, he told us in a phone call from his home in Lexington, MA. “Ross and Bev’s son David sang with the Collegium when he was at Harvard. They came to several concerts and really liked what we were doing, especially with Renaissance polyphony. Interestingly, I had met Bev at workshops I offered in the White Mountains of New Hampshire in the summer of 1979 and 1980. The fact that Ross and Bev went to Stanford the same time I did means that we see things similarly, though they’ve gone much more in depth into musicological areas and I into performance areas. When they came to Cambridge, I would see Ross after concerts and he told me about Quire Cleveland and invited me to come and conduct the group at some convenient time.”

Though Renaissance polyphony is Marvin’s first love and a specialty, Duffin’s proposal of a concert completely devoted to the music of the sixteenth-century Vatican composer Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina (1525/6-1594) came as a bit of a surprise. “Ross brought a folder of music as well as a CD by a group who alternated the Pope Marcellus Mass with motets. I tend to avoid all-Renaissance programs because that’s really not what I want to do, but I had only conducted one movement of the Mass and before and knew almost none of those motets. It’s just really remarkable, really expressive, quite beautiful music and I’m happy to be doing this.”

Renaissance polyphony is scarce on choral programs these days, Marvin laments, and the music of Palestrina, lionized by scholars in the nineteenth century, has almost disappeared. Too bad in both cases, Marvin says. “It’s music that lifts you to another sort of spiritual level and can provide transcendent moments. That’s what drew me to music as an undergraduate.” Like the CD that inspired this concert, Quire’s program on May 25 will interleave movements of the Pope Marcellus mass with a number of motets ranging from four to six voices and double choir, mostly unpublished except in scholarly monuments. Duffin has provided practical editions for the occasion.

What is it about this repertory that can elicit such a response from the listener? “I came to realize that what takes you into another world and into a totally euphoric state is the combination of the modes,” Jameson says, referring to the non-tonal scales that the ancient Greeks invented and believed could inspire various emotional states, and which Renaissance composers rediscovered and used to organize their musical material. “Modes don’t clearly confirm an affect or mood like major or minor scales do, but I’m very drawn to the subtle emotions of the modes. Dorian is either half sad or half happy. Phrygian is mostly sad. Lydian is really exotic and Mixolydian is mostly happy.”

Jameson Marvin can easily launch into a whole lecture about how Renaissance music is constructed and how those techniques produce emotional reactions in the listener, but a lot of those techniques are involved in the musical painting of words through dissonance and consonance and changes in the flow of the music: highlighting the name Mary — to whom most of the motets on the Quire concert are devoted — and portraying verbs through accelerated musical activity.

Though he’s a specialist in what makes Renaissance polyphony tick, Marvin is not a purist when it comes to choral tone. “Who knows how this music was performed? By gosh, there was no recording device there in Rome so we could know what Palestrina’s choirs sounded like. I often wonder when I hear groups where the soprano tone is so pure and straight as a laser beam and men are singing below them with vibrato. It’s fairly obvious they didn’t originally sing that way.”

Jameson Marvin conducts Quire Cleveland in an all-Palestrina program at Historic St. Peter’s Church at 17th and Superior in downtown Cleveland on Saturday evening, May 25 at 7:30 pm. Tickets are available online (under 18 admitted free).

Jameson Marvin will have more to say about Renaissance polyphony and the rich experience of choral singing at Harvard when he speaks at the Spring Dinner of the Harvard Club of Northeast Ohio on Thursday, May 23 at 7:00 pm at the Cleveland Skating Club. Some places may still be available. Email club president Andria Derstine if you’re interested in attending the dinner or the speech that follows.

Julian Karahalios

Beverly Simmons — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:41:20 +0000

Julian Karahalios, tenor, graduated from Baldwin Wallace Conservatory of Music with a BM in Composition in 2013. As an ensemble member, Julian has sung with Westminster Chamber Choir and Apollo’s Fire. Also an avid Bass player, he will be attending California Institute of the Arts next fall to pursue a master’s degree in Jazz Performance. When not surrounded by art, he fills his life with people, food, cats, his garden, and laughter.

Brian Wentzel

Beverly Simmons — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 15:21:09 +0000

Tenor Brian Wentzel is an organist, singer, and composer. Since 2006 he has been Director of Music at First Lutheran Church in Lorain, Ohio, where he directs the choir, plays the historic Brombaugh organ, and administers the FIRST·music concert series, among other duties. He maintains an active performance schedule, playing recitals, leading hymn festivals, and singing in professional choirs in the Cleveland area. He composes and arranges extensively for his congregation, and is published by Augsburg Fortress. Brian has degrees in mathematics, organ performance, and sacred music, and holds the Fellowship certification from the American Guild of Organists.

Megan Huckabay Lapp

Beverly Simmons — Tue, 19 Mar 2013 01:48:27 +0000

Megan Huckabay Lapp, originally from Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, completed her B.Mus. and B.Ed. at the University of Victoria, BC, and M.Mus. at the University of Washington in Seattle. Inspired by the power of singing to unite communities and build confidence in young people, she has taught at the elementary, secondary, and collegiate levels. Her most recent project was the creation of a musical for elementary students, based on the Green Belt movement and the work of Nobel Prize winner Wangari Maathai. Megan has been honored to study with Ellen Hargis at Case Western Reserve and Kendra Colton at Oberlin College.

Duffin conducted skillfully

Beverly Simmons — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:05:35 +0000

[Ross Duffin] conducted skillfully and effectively, energetically … and expressively.

stunning panache

Beverly Simmons — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 19:03:26 +0000

stunning panache

Extraordinary accuracy and ringing tones

Beverly Simmons — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 18:50:30 +0000

Quire’s ensemble singing stood out for its extraordinary accuracy of pitch and its ringing tones.

Review: Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds 4

Beverly Simmons — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 03:14:41 +0000

Those of us who love choral music have much to be grateful for at the holidays. When else in the year do we hear so much wonderful ensemble singing?

For at least six hundred years, Christmas has been the occasion for composers to write for choirs. Last weekend, Ross Duffin and Quire Cleveland brought us a rich program of mostly unfamiliar treasures. I attended Sunday afternoon’s concert, for which Trinity Cathedral’s seats were mostly full, and during which the sun streamed through the stained-glass windows.

Quire, now in its fifth year, is an ensemble of twenty highly accomplished singers. Their sound was crystal clear, with crisp diction and uniform vowels. They sang with remarkable ease in five languages—Latin, German, French, Spanish, and English—sometimes at breakneck speed, as in Michael Praetorius’s delightful German/Latin “patter song,” Psallite, unigenito.

The varied program included mostly late-medieval and Renaissance works, largely on the lighter side. Duffin’s selection featured a good proportion of carols and motets that gave vocal homage to the babe in the manger. Among my favorites was a stunning piece, Quid petis, o fili? by the Tudor composer Richard Pygott, from a manuscript copied out for Henry VIII. Its sensual text, in English and Latin, was a love feast between Mary, her son, and his father, with kisses enough for Catullus.

A group of French songs brought the exuberance of secular music to the Nativity scene. A mid-sixteenth-century piece by Mathiew Sohier took a bawdy song off the streets (about a young girl married against her will) and made a charming “noël” of it. In Quire’s engaging rhythms, we could practically hear the shepherds dancing, as the text says, after their visit to the baby Jesus.

At the start of the concert, Duffin announced that, in the shadow of the Newtown shootings, the first two pieces on the program would be replaced by a motet about the biblical massacre of the innocents, Jacobean composer George Kirbye’s intense Vox in Rama: “Rachel weeping for her children, refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

Quire’s ensemble singing stood out for its extraordinary accuracy of pitch and its ringing tones. Not surprising for a group directed by the author of a book decrying equal temperament (the “compromise” tuning used on today’s pianos), Quire sang with amazingly pure and lovely intervals. The open fifths and octaves of medieval and Renaissance harmony were secure from the very beginning of the chords.

Many Nativity carols are based on intricate “macaronic” texts (that is, in a mix of several languages; “macaroni” was originally a term for a mishmash of different kinds of food, and by extension, of bits of poetry!) Quire pulled these off with stunning panache. The whole ensemble usually sang the refrain (as in the familiar fifteenth-century English “Nowell sing we, both all and some; / Now rex pacificus is ycome!”). The verses were then distributed amongst small ensembles of two or three singers, each verse taken by different singers. It was a joy to hear the variety of textures and tones that resulted from this distribution of vocal riches.

Quire’s experienced and focused singers handled the complicated roadmap of these strophic songs without hesitation, unerringly steering down the correct lane without losing a beat. The varying makeup of these ensembles sometimes landed the soloists at opposite ends of the choral line-up, some distance from each other. And yet, the intricate rhythms were kept in sync, almost without exception.

Much of the appeal of this Christmas feast was due to the commitment and skill of its head chef, CWRU professor Ross Duffin. He has clearly spent a great deal of effort unearthing these wonderful pieces. He edited most of the songs, and in many cases added period-appropriate harmonizations to the bare-bones outlines that come down to us in the old manuscripts. He conducted skillfully and effectively, energetically setting the mostly upbeat tempos and expressively embodying the cross-rhythms and counterpoint.

Quire was selling, at very reasonable prices, two CDs based on previous Christmas concerts—well worth buying from their website. A CD of Jacobean motets is also in the making for release in 2013.

Nicholas Jones is Professor of English at Oberlin College and a keen amateur musician.

Carols for Quire from the Old & New Worlds (4th annual)

Beverly Simmons — Fri, 21 Dec 2012 11:30:44 +0000

The tradition continues — Carols for Quire from the Old and New Worlds (now in its fourth year) celebrates the season with beautiful and inspiring music from yesterday and today. Under the direction of Ross W. Duffin, Quire Cleveland makes the spectacular architecture of Trinity Cathedral resonate from the rafters with glorious choral song that is entertaining & accessible to all.

Friday, December 21 & Saturday, December 22 at 7:30 pm & Sunday, December 23 at 3 pm
Trinity Cathedral
2230 Euclid Avenue
Cleveland, OH

Enjoy music for celebration & contemplation from the 13th to the 21st centuries — Medieval carols, Renaissance motets, plus songs from Slovenia, Finland, Germany, Spain, France, England, and America.

Everyone is welcome. These glorious sounds are guaranteed to make your holiday season more harmonious!

TICKETS: $25 premium seating; $15 general admission; $10 senior (65+);
$7 student (full-time); one child FREE admitted when accompanied by adult/senior/student; $5 additional child.

Parking at Trinity Commons and at Cleveland State University Prospect Garage.