On January 26th, VSO has hosted a big birthday party in Vancouver to celebrate its 100 years of musical journey. Downtown was flooded with music lovers – the huge lines outside of venues, the people rushing to see the next performances, the happy smiles and the body grooves of the audiences, the enthusiastic performers on the stages, etc. etc.. I was so grateful for being a Vancouverite with access to such a wonderful music community.
Being a choral singer ever since high school, I wanted to take this opportunity to see some choir performances. I quickly made up my mind to check out Elektra Women’s Choir, not only for its reputation in the choral community; but most importantly, for it being co-founded by Diane Loomer.
When I was still a high school student singing in Point Grey Chamber Choir, I once had the privilege of attending one of Diane Loomer’s choral workshops. Not only her choral knowledge was so extensive, but her techniques applied to our singing were so effective that we had immediate improvements during the workshop. Unfortunately, my choral director has passed us the disheartening news of her decease, just a year after we had our workshop. Having heard that Diane co-founded Elektra Women’s Choir, I knew that I must attend.
Elektra Women’s Choir only had time to sing four songs since the time slot for them was only 30 minutes long. I entered the Orpheum Theatre Stage 3 minutes before the performance started, therefore I was sitting towards the back. Orpheum is a big venue designed for orchestras and symphonies, and it could hold many audiences. Since the stage needed to accommodate many different groups on the same day, there was very minimal stage equipment available, such as speakers and mics. For this reason, it was a tad difficult to hear the choir, especially when the space was also creating a lot of echoes and the choir was singing in a slow tempo, mostly in ‘oo’ vowel, and with not a lot of rapid dynamic changes. Another factor was that for women’s choirs, the sound might be even harder to be heard within such a big space without the support of the basses.
The pieces being performed were very much like the hymns from the Renaissance Era – sacred, with homophonic texture (soprano line singing the melody with the other parts accompanying), and polyphonic in the homorhythmic part, or the chorale part. Even though the text was not as strophic as the hymns, the melody was still being repeated once or twice with new or old words (I couldn’t hear exactly due to the echoes).
The Elektra Women’s Choir had very beautiful voices. The vowels were round with resonance, and the singers blended with each other very well. During the polyphonic parts, all the singers were very in sync, and no voices stood out (the optimal polyphony!). Overall, I enjoyed their performance very much, and I would love to attend their concert, where I could hear them in a venue designed for singing so I could enjoy their beautiful voices more.