Author Archives: fiona sudihok

On 29th March 2019, I had the pleasure of attending a concert held by the University Singers and Wellesley College in St James Anglican Church in Downtown Eastside. In this concert, the University singers performed a selection of songs they would be performing in their upcoming tour to Italy in April-May. They are joined in this performance by the Wellesley College Women’s Choir, who also sang their own set and collaborated with the University Singers for a few songs.

The concert opened with Angelus Domini by Giovanni Gabrieli, and they sung this in the round, surrounding the audience. This standing formation made the already interesting piece even more fascinating to me as the way they were standing revealed different individual parts and because of how they were spaced in the venue it became easy to enjoy the piece fully but also pick apart the different parts as they were singing. There were parts where it sounded like the choirs split into two and it sounded like they were talking to each other in a call and response across the church, which made the performance incredibly engaging for me. One interesting thing about this piece that the conductor Graeme Langager shared – is that it was written to be performed in St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice and that the University Singers will have the opportunity to perform this very piece at that venue during their upcoming Italy Tour.

One of my other favourite pieces from this performance was Rock-A My Soul (A piece which they also performed in their last concert, UBC Choirs: Stories). Having heard this piece before meant that it was easier to pay attention to the details the second time. This piece is incredibly catchy and I particularly loved how much dynamics there is in the piece. The piece opens with a contrast between forte parts and piano parts, and the first verse was sung in a neutral dynamic and the second verse contrasted that initial dynamic and was sung so softly. The detailed way the University Singers sang these dynamic contrasts made the performance much more impressive, as it made the moments where the choir sings in rich chords that ring loudly that much more special.

Another one of the fun pieces the University Singers sang was the classic folk song She’ll Be Comin’ Round The Mountain – this was so enjoyable because the piece is incredibly familiar to almost everyone in the audience but was a different arrangement rather than the straight way we’re used to singing it. The familiarity to the piece also made it easier to pick out the little interesting moments in the piece and pay more attention to the accompaniment and what the short little motives they were doing under the melody.

Part of what makes the University Singers so enjoyable to watch is how expressive the singers are when they perform. It’s easy to buy into their performance when the audience is able to see how invested they are in their performances and how excited they seem to be about their music, especially in pieces that are more upbeat. Overall, I thought the University Singers and The Wellesley College Women’s Choir put on an incredibly entertaining performance, and I thoroughly enjoyed every second of it.

On February 28th, 2019, I had the privilege of attending the American Choral Directors Association Conference with the Vancouver Youth Choir, one of 26 invited choirs (and the only Canadian choir) invited to perform at the conference. The conference is attended by approximately 4000 choral conductors, all of whom we had to perform in front of. We have been working tirelessly on our set since before Christmas and have performed it over 8 times in different settings to prepare to perform the same set twice in the same day for thousands of people who know and understand choral music, and the pressure was high.

The thing that’s unique and most challenging about the set we prepared for this performance was the drastic difference between each of the pieces – we start with a slow piece, to a modern, edgy piece with a lot of literal screaming and body percussion, followed by a German piece from the Romantic Era, then a Women’s’ piece from Georgia about political upheaval. The set then continues with an Indie Rock piece called Water Fountain, followed by an Icelandic dance song (which included real choreographed dance steps) and ended with a pop song called North by the band Sleeping At Last. All these pieces are not only different in character, but they also require drastically different sounds and to have to switch from one colour of sound to another in 10 seconds or less was something we worked really hard to master. The transition that was most difficult for most of us singers was between our second and third piece (From aggressive screaming and body percussion to a rich, serious toned Romantic Era piece.)

Our opening number was Ilus Ta Ei Ole by young Estonian composer Pärt Uusberg, a piece about love for homeland that starts with the Men section singing a repeated melody that outlines how bleak Estonia is while the Women section sings the same chord progression over, starting from a soft hum to a loud Ah before the piece abruptly stops and transitions into words that outline how beautiful estonia is and the melody line is passed on from one section to the next before the whole choir joins in to tie the piece together, building up to the shimmery chords in the climax before doing a decrescendo and taking the piece back down to an intimate stop. The thing that was so fun about this piece was getting to play with the dynamics and the finding different ways to interpret Pärt Uusberg’s writing – there are some incredibly intimate moments that required incredible delicacy, and there are also showy moments like the low bass notes in the opening of the piece as well as the climactic chor – and we had a lot of fun trying to find the most effective ways to deliver this incredible piece of writing. The most satisfying part of singing this piece is how we can always the climax near the end, and how a few bars before we get there, as we crescendo and sing our notes we would be able to tell whether or not we would perfectly tune the climax as the energy continues to build.

This is followed immediately by a piece called Fire by UBC Graduate Student Composer: Katerina Gimon. The piece is part of a larger work called Elements and has no words, just body percussion parts and peculiar sounds and screams that illustrate the energy of fire itself. This piece is incredibly fun to do but also vocally challenging, and having it placed so early in the set was something that made me nervous. It took a while for us to master the transitions from the first piece to this the to the next piece – as this piece requires not just a drastic change in sound but also an incredible change in physical energy. The thing we focused on the most while working on this was how to do everything with intent in order for the piece to sound energetic and fiery as opposed to just a piece with weird sounds. The key to performing this piece successfully was the full commitment from each and every singer not just with our voices, but also our body language, our faces, and our overall physical energy to propel the performance forward in order to do this incredible piece justice.

After 6 years in this choir and many fun performances along the way, this was truly one of the most high caliber and nerve wracking performances we’ve ever had to prepare, and I’ve never had more fun performing as I did that day. Given that it’s a National Choral Conference, we got to perform in one of the best spaces I’ve ever sung in: A beautiful concert hall like the Chan Centre or the Orpheum, but made especially for choral music (complete with built in wooden risers in a deep U-shaped curve with tons of space). In spaces like these usually the audience gets great sound quality, but as members of the choir it’s hard to hear ourselves and the people around us (for me personally, I usually hear myself a lot and not much of anyone else, making it difficult to tune or figure out if you’re singing too loudly or too softly). This space was didn’t just sound great for the audience – it sounded great for us too and was an incredibly comfortable stage to perform in as I was able to not only hear myself but also the people around me, and therefore was able to sing better and tune better and make better music. Getting to perform for an audience fo 4000 choral conductors also turned out to be a lot of fun – as there’s nothing quite as satisfying as getting to perform music you love and worked so hard on to be welcomed with cheers and standing ovations in a city where no one knew who we were.

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.

As a long time lover of choral music, it was such a joy to get to attend UBC Choir’s Stories concert last Friday, February 15th. The concert featured three of UBC’s Choral ensembles: University Singers, Choral Union, and UBC’s Chamber Choir.

As suggested by the theme, the concert featured works that tell some type of story in one way or another. The concert opened with a set by University Singers, conducted by Dr. Graeme Langager. They opened their set with Hosanna, to the Son of David, a madrigal by Thomas Weelkes. This piece starts with a Homophonic line and then quickly transitions into complex polyphony, a texture that was used until the end of the song. The piece was incredibly rhythmic and exciting, and definitely a great choice for the opening as it set the tone and energy perfectly for the rest of the concert.

Another particular performance that I enjoyed was Eric Whitacre’s Iconic Five Hebrew Love songs – composed to words written in Hebrew by his wife. The thing I love so much about this work is how beautifully it is composed: the word painting and the long melodic lines and the interaction between the choir and the violin and the piano – and UBC’s Choral Union executed it beautifully. The word painting is most evident in Eyze Sheleg (What Snow!): The choir sings “Bong” in unison before the voices come apart and each singer sings bong at their own time, creating the effect of snowflakes falling, while the soprano soloist sings a line that made me visualize a beam of light through the snow. Because of my familiarity with this piece, I did notice that there was a part missing in this performance (the soprano solo that happens after the choir comes in) and I can’t think of a reason why they might have taken it out of the performance. Despite that, I still thought it was one of the more beautiful renditions of Whitacre’s work and thoroughly enjoyed the performance.

Something interesting I noticed was that University Singers and Chamber Choir were much smaller choirs and sang more polyphonic pieces, while Choral Union, the biggest ensemble out of the three, mostly sang in homophony – which I thought was interesting. I can’t say if these choices have anything to do with the levels of the choir and the background the singers have, but I thought it was a particularly great choice considering the number of voices and the powerful effect that many people singing together homorhythmically can create. Another thing I found interesting was the drastic change of tambers between the choirs. Due to the fact that Choral Union was larger, the sound that they created together had significantly more reverb in the space. When they sang together it created this powerful effect that wasn’t necessarily just the volume of the sound, but a richness that could only be the result of that many different voices coming together. The smaller ensembles on the other hand (University Singers and Chamber Choir) had much cleaner, more precise and unified sounds. The dynamic contrasts were more present (I thought their piano dynamic was particularly impressive) and as a result they were able to sing polyphonic lines in a way that was much easier to follow due to the more unified, clean sounds each section had that made it sound like only 4 or 8 different voices were singing together as opposed to 30. It’s important to note as well that the pieces performed came from a variety of different styles and eras and all choirs did a great job of capturing the character of each song and telling each of those stories by changing the overall tone and colour of their voices for each of the different pieces.

One of the coolest things about this concert was when I realized why some experiences that come with live music can’t be recreated through a recording of the performance. Throughout the concert, the choirs stood in a variety of different standing arrangements, and in some of them, you could hear the spatial effects very clearly that drastically changed the listening experience. For example, there was a double choir piece: And So I Go On, Jake Runestad – a song about a loved one passing away, composed in such a way that one choir acts as the voice of the person who is gone and the other choir sings as the voice of the living person left behind). For this piece, the choir was standing such that the first choir stood on the left side and the second choir stood on the right side. This created both a visual effect as well as an audio effect that made the delivery of the message much more engaging and effective. This happened in a few of the other pieces as well when the choirs were standing in their various different standing arrangements (Mixed, SATB parts, etc.)

Overall, I can honestly say that this was one of my favourite choral concerts I have ever attended. The pieces that were chosen were all so beautiful and engaging and I found myself discovering new things about pieces I already knew and finding new pieces to fall in love with. The ensembles executed each piece with a lot of finesse and attention to detail – and I would definitely come to more of UBC Choirs concerts in the future.

On Friday, February 1st I had the privilege of watching UBC Opera’s production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) at the Chan Centre for Performing Arts. It was my first time watching an Opera and it was certainly a memorable experience. After learning about the Three Act Structure of Opera Seria and having no prior exposure to Operatic music, I showed up expecting a Three Act Structure and was quite surprised to see that the first page of the program stated that this was an Opera in two acts. The specific structure is called a Singspiel and content alternates between spoken prose and singing that can be heard throughout the Opera.

The opera opens with an overture played by the orchestra and transitions seamlessly into the first aria of the Opera sung by a Tenor. This mirrors the typical Opera structure we learned about in class, specifically how most operas open with an Instrumental overture that serves as an introduction and usually helps introduce the next excerpt in the work, as we discovered in our in-class analysis of Dido and Aeneas (Overture, followed by Wayward Sisters). Another familiar element that I recall was spoken about in class was the fact that women who appear in threes are never a good sign in Operas, which made me more alert to the Three Ladies and the Three Spirits. Overall the performances were incredibly impressive but I have to admit it was hard to focus on engaging meaningfully with the music when the text was sung in German and I was mostly busy trying to understand the plot by reading the English surtitles provided, which allowed me to understand what was happening plot-wise but made it hard to take notes of the specific details of some of the pieces.

My favourite piece from the performance has to be the iconic aria “Der Hölle Rache kocht in meinem Herzen”. I didn’t recognize the piece at first but later in the aria actually began to realize that this was a piece that I already knew, which made me excited and made it easier to pay close attention to the specific musical details that were happening. This aria is impressive, to say the least, and it was interesting to just have heard the piece in passing and compare it to an active performance of it. The soprano who portrays the Queen of the Night hits all the notes flawlessly and effortlessly, and executes my personal favourite part: the part where the words end and the soprano sings the short notes at an incredibly high pitch. Listening to the piece in context, I was able to see how the plot was made significant through the compositional choices that Mozart made. Those short, piercing high notes are sung like the Queen of The Night is painting an image of stabbing Sarastro by hitting him with these incredibly precise repeated high notes (executed perfectly by the Soprano.) Another thing that I found fascinating about this aria is the interaction between the orchestra and the Queen of the Night, in particular, the use of a lot of imitations in some parts and how sometimes they even echo each other exactly.

Overall, UBC Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute was a great First Opera to attend. The students put on incredible performances and it was impressive to see how much talent UBC has and how capable they were of putting on such an amazing production.