Lyric Opera of Chicago Chorus in concert -- "Sweet singing in the choir"

Here is my Tuesday December 16 suntimes.com review of the Sunday December 14 Lyric Opera of Chicago Chorus concert with Lyric Opera chorus master  Donald Nally and organists Sir Andrew Davis and Richard Hoskins.

Lyric Opera Chorus triumphantly rings in the season with 'Holly and Ivy'

BY ANDREW PATNER

It took 54 years for the Lyric Opera Chorus to give its first stand-alone concert.  While one wishes the wait hadn't been so long, the much-belated debut performance Sunday exceeded even high expectations, and the group's outstanding profile has been raised.

The brainchild of Lyric's chorus master Donald Nally, who took up the job of directing the opera company's chorus last season, Holly and Ivy was billed as a holiday concert and a subscriber appreciation premium for Lyric subscribers.  But unlike the glitzy and commercial-styled Welcome Yule! Christmas concerts of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, the program at the Civic Opera House was made up entirely not only of serious repertoire but many challenging and complex works as well, along with a beautiful, commissioned world première by a young American composer.  And the full house ate up every moment.

The Lyric Opera's chorus master, Donald Nally, brilliantly leads the chorus through the program of American, English and French works in "Holly and Ivy." 

Nally is clearly a brilliant curator and explicator of choral music as well as a superb leader of choruses (including the new-music focused The Crossing, in his home base of Philadelphia).  The program of American, English, and French works for the Advent season even offered a meaty rarity, Arnold Schoenberg's 1907 "Friede auf Erden" ("Peace on Earth"), with each work relating to the others.  Nally also wrote his own highly informative, lucid, and extremely insightful program notes.

West Coast-based Morten Lauridsen's 1994 setting of "O magnum mysterium" is already a choral classic and established the tone for the afternoon -- serious, experimental, stirring.  Post-war settings of other medieval and biblical texts by New Englander Hubert Bird, Britain's Gerald Finzi, and Francis Poulenc also showed how both chorus and audience could be challenged and involved simultaneously.

Richard Hoskins, the stalwart music director and organist at St. Chrysostom's Episcopal Church on the Gold Coast, was the always sensitive accompanist on the Rodgers digital instrument placed upstage center.  The program also featured three solo organ works selected and performed by Lyric music director Sir Andrew Davis (who, in other parts of the program, also turned pages for Hoskins!).  Keyboard works of Bach, Brahms, and Messiaen, all meditations on the Nativity, were woven in with the choral numbers to make a varied but seamless whole.  The frenetic rhythms in the Messiaen (a nice tip of the hat to the composer's 100th birthday anniversary last week) led into Schoenberg's bracing farewell to tonality in an almost "Can you top this?" spirit.

The second half opened with the new work, a jeweler-worthy setting of the medieval "The Holly and the Ivy" by Philadelphia's Benjamin C.S. Boyle, just 29.  Additional subtle and moving arrangements of Welsh, English, French, American, and Catalan carols followed.  Soloists, all from Lyric's chorus, were fine, with the standout being mezzo Gwendolyn Brown, haunting in Leo Nestor's 1998 arrangement of the 1933 John Jacob Niles Appalachian-inspired standard "I Wonder as I Wander."

The work of a concert choir is very different -- in style, form, method, and even volume -- from an opera chorus; with the chorus playing major roles thus far in this season's Manon, The Pearl Fishers, and Madama Butterfly already this season, rehearsal time and focus for the ensemble had to be a challenge.  With no orchestra and with works featuring a tremendous amount of part writing, the singers were greatly exposed. Singing a cappella or with often minimal organ accompaniment, the chorus had to fill the huge house without pushing.  But as he has done in these works, and as he showed especially with the large guest chorus now anchoring Porgy and Bess, Nally is a master of versatility and control.

Let's hope that Holly and Ivy, already a triumph of the season, inspires at least an annual event. Deck the halls, indeed!