The Music of Eric Whitacre at Carnegie Hall
The hall wasn't open yet. Singers in black were already out on 57th Street, photographing each other. They'd come from Spokane Falls, from high schools in Oklahoma, Alabama, Missouri, eastern California. Sixteen ensembles, assembled by DCINY to share the Stern Auditorium stage for one night.
Where they came from mattered. A community chorus from eastern California and a high school choir from Missouri don't end up on the same risers very often. DCINY has been doing this kind of assembly for a long time. This was Whitacre's 25th appearance on their concert series! He knew the room. The room knew what it meant to be there.
The concert opened with Sarah Hopkins's Past Life Melodies, a song made of overtone singing and long sustained tones. As an opener it asked the audience to sit inside the sound before the night had earned any footing. The first half moved through Moses Hogan's arrangement of The Battle of Jericho, Jennifer Lucy Cook's arrangement of What Was I Made For? and her composition Time, with Kelly Yu-Chieh Lin at the piano, and Whitacre's Sing Gently and Lux Aurumque.
Between pieces, Whitacre talked. Not program notes off a card, actual conversation with the house about where the music came from and what it cost to write it. Sing Gently got some of that. He wrote it during COVID for a Virtual Choir, seventeen thousand singers from 129 countries. The people performing it here had gotten on planes to be in the same room together. That doesn't change what the piece sounds like but it does change what you're watching.
The first half closed with Hogan's arrangement of Elijah Rock. The second half opened with The Battle of Jericho. Same arranger with different weight, the night reset between them.
The second half also brought Five Hebrew Love Songs, with Jorge Ávila and Katie Thomas on violins, Nikki Federman on viola, and Jake Charkey on cello. The string quartet pulled the sound somewhere more chamber-scaled after big choral textures all night. Charkey returned after a brief appearance earlier in Act one where his solo cello accompanied the choir in Selections from The Sacred Veil.
Trent Reznor's Hurt, arranged by Whitacre, sat differently from everything around it. Running a song that specific through a combined choral ensemble of this size is a choice. Another choice was closing the concert with Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening. Everyone in the room already knew the poem, and most of the people in the room knew Whitacre’s piece Sleep, but this was a Carnegie Hall debut of the piece with these lyrics because Whitacre had been unable to have a choir perform the words that the music was originally written for until the poem entered the public domain.
I was at the back of the hall for most of the night, and if you want a photographer who's watching the stage rather than waiting for a pose, I'd love to talk.
