On Sunday, March 10th, 2019 I had the pleasure of watching the Richmond Orchestra and Chorus in their Sing Shalom! Concert. Shalom is a Hebrew word meaning peace, and as suggested by the title: this concert features Jewish music, both sacred and secular that promotes that very idea of harmony.
The very first piece that stood out for me was one titled Ani Ma’amin, sung beautifully by the tenors and basses in the first half of the concert. The part that stood out for me was the spoken part, read by one of the women during the instrumental interlude in the middle of the piece. She read out the context of the piece, telling the story about how this song was known to have been sung by Jews on their way to the gas chambers during the Holocaust, illustrating how much they believed in their faith and the coming of Messiah until the very end.
The feature piece of this concert was Aaron Copland’s In The Beginning – a song about genesis featuring Mezzo Soprano Tabitha Brasso-Ernst. The Soloist tells the story while the choir paints the context of the story of the creation of the world. This piece uses a lot of word painting, for example during the part where they talked about dividing, the choir sings in polyphony, while every time they say the word light they all sing a high, ringing chord that makes me picture light. This choir excels when they’re singing homophonically with forte dynamic. This piece was meant to be sung acapella but they were accompanied by piano (a fact that conductor Brigid Coult pointed out), and the piano anchors the choir due to the extremely tricky tuning in the piece as they keep switching between major and minor keys. This fact makes the soloist even more impressive to me, as she does a fantastic job finding her pitch with no cues from either the piano (other than the beginning) or even from the choir. A lot of her starting pitches are not members of the chord the choir just sang, and sometimes they aren’t even in the same key and noticing this made me respect her even more as a musician. Overall I thought this piece was incredibly stunning and does a fantastic job of using music to recreate the story of the book of Genesis.
The second half of the concert features Jewish secular folk music, which included Eric Whitacre’s Five Hebrew Love Songs. The standout piece of the second half for me was Bashana Haba’ah. I noticed that in this piece they repeated the whole verse and chorus twice. The first time they sing the lower parts gets to sing the verse and the women take over the melody in the chorus, as the overall sense of octave placement goes higher and higher until the end of the first verse. The second time they sing the verse and the chorus, it starts with the higher voices singing the verse, gradually going lower until the men take over the chorus, creating a nice contrast and avoiding repetitiveness in a relatively simple song.
Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this concert and walked away feeling very wholesome. I loved watching how much the singers seemed to love sharing the music and how the rest of the audience responded to their singing, as I could hear them commenting on the joy they felt after watching each song and how beautiful they thought the experience was. I couldn’t agree with them more.