Cantata carol concert a perfect Christmas celebration

Laurence Ewashko, conductor
Where: National Gallery of Canada, Auditorium
When: Sunday afternoon only

By Murray Dineen, Citizen correspondent

The Ottawa Citizen
Page C14 Monday, December 9, 1996 ©1996

Ah Scrooge ... . If you haven't noticed, it's that time of year again. Time to put your pen down, take a sip of something, and warm your pipes. The carolling season is upon us.

The Cantata Singers, under the guidance of Laurence Ewashko, gave us a pleasant reminder Sunday afternoon at the second concert of the Concerts Plus series sponsored by the Friends of the National Gallery.

Nicely put together, the concert comprised old favorites in old and new arrangements, and a few surprises. And there was the choir's well-tailored balance, an evergreen we can count upon.

And there was a delightful spontaneity to the afternoon, which included three singalong selections, to which the audience — comprised largely of families — responded nicely. Throw in a cast of small children running delightfully amok on the auditorium's stairs, and you have a perfect Christmas celebration.

The afternoon began with Healey Willan's Hodie Christus natus est (Today Christ is born), a motet showing the composer's constant indebtedness to Christian chant traditions. Elastic rhythms, vocal lines converging, a care for the sonority of Latin phonics — all these things Willan presumably learned from church service chants, but in his hands they are transformed into a crystal moment of celebration.

The carol What Child is This? (arranged by the gifted British choralist Sir David Wilcocks) began with a good display of men's voices. I have complained before about how tenors and basses in other ensembles and in our time seem to pale in vocal production in comparison with their female counterparts. The men in this ensemble, however, begin to make me doubt my generation's mindset that men in groups larger than three cannot sing, and my only wish is that the men on Sunday had put that myth to rest a little more vociferously.

Nice solo work

Among the other highlights of the afternoon was a rendition of Away in a Manger with a nicely turned solo by Christina Finlay. The arrangement by Elmer Iseler had the remainder of the choir singing three gentle syllables — "o" for the first chorus, "ah" for the second, and "uh " for the last. The effect was as if the soloist were bathed in three deliciously separate colors.

Included in the program was a little relief from Noël, an energetic reading of Schubert's Lebenslust (Love of Life), a foretaste of the Singers' concert of Schubert and Brahms on Feb. 15.

Of note were several novelties: arrangements of two Austrian carols by Ewashko, Leise rieselt der Schnee (Gently the snowdrifts down) and Es wird sho' glei' dumpa (here my German skills defeat me), as well as a version of The Carol of the Bells, arranged by Mykola Leontovych in what sounded like either Ukrainian or Russian.

The afternoon concluded with carol arrangements by John Rutter — The Holly and the Ivy — and by two members of the ensemble the King's Singers, John McCarthy's The Drummer Boy, and Geoffrey Keating's The Twelve Days of Christmas.