Cantata's chorus best of concert

When the members of the Ottawa Regional Youth Choir filed into the performance space at St. Matthew’s Church Sunday evening, temporarily displacing their hosts, the Cantata Singers of Ottawa, one wondered if they might be a tad nervous.

It would be surprising if they weren’t. Conductor Laurence Ewashko and the Cantata Singers had just done a spectacular job with three choral songs by Lionel Daunais. The dynamics and ensemble were superb and there was an almost sensuous perfection of mood to every phrase. It was a hard act to follow.

The Youth Choir didn’t sound much like the Cantata Singers when Barbara Clark led it in five delightful songs by Stephen Chatman. It had its own sound, and a good sound too.

Although the part singing in these selections was not too complex, one had the impression that they were being sung by a choral ensemble with an identity and with a well-founded confidence in its ability to put the music across effectively.

The choir achieves a surprisingly good balance considering that the female voices outnumber the males by about two to one.

And considering how different the two choirs sound, it was gratifying to hear how fine the results were when they joined forces in four Flower Songs by Benjamin Britten. These pieces, while slight in the context of Britten’s overall output, are a step or so beyond the sophistication of the music that had already been performed, and they were rendered with conviction and a clear focus.

Although the music was challenging, at least the young singers had the security of being mixed in with the more experienced adult singers. But that security was exchanged for a potentially unflattering comparison when two very avant-garde works by R. Murray Schafer opened the second half of the program.

The first, Miniwanka, or the Moments of Water, was sung by the Cantata Singers, brilliantly as usual. The second, Epitaph for Moonlight, was given to the young singers who handled its fierce challenges as though they hardly noticed them.

A hint of what makes the youth choir sounds as it does, along with Barbara Clark’s direction, came in the next offering, Hills of the North, a meditation on the familiar Land of the Silver Birch by the Cantata Singers’ Margrit Cattell.

It was actually sung by the Cantata Singers, but featured soloist Emily Tyson, a soprano from the Youth Choir. Despite a few blemishes, her account of the part was genuinely beautiful. If she is at all representative of the other voices in the Youth Choir, it’s no wonder that they sound as well together as they do.

Richard Todd is a freelance writer.