Cantata Singers to tour music history

Laurence Ewashko will lead his 45 singers through choral highlights of the millennium Sunday at St. Matthew's Church in the Glebe.

CHRIS MIKULA, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN

One of Ottawa's most prominent choirs will take audiences on a musical tour of the past thousand years Sunday night, from 11th-century Gregorian chant to Carl Orff's 20th-century crowd pleaser, Carmina Burana.

The 45-voice Cantata Singers of Ottawa, led by Laurence Ewashko, will perform choral highlights of the past 10 centuries. As well as Gregorian chant, the first half of the concert will include plain chant by 12th-century composer Hildegard von Bingen; a 13th-century English round; a 15th-century motet by Joaquin des Pres; a 16th-century madrigal, an aria from Henry Purcell's 17th-century opera Dido and Aeneas and, by 14th-century composer Guillaume de Machaut, the first four-voice piece of music.

The concert's second half will start with the 18th century, with an excerpt from Handel's Messiah, and will include a Bach cantata, Mozart's Ave Verum; music by Schubert; the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's Il Trovatore; an excerpt from Carmina Burana; pieces by Canadians Harry Somers and R. Murray Schafer and a Moses Hogan arrangement of the spiritual Elijah Rock.

A narrator will introduce some of the pieces and talk about the musical evolution they represent.

Ewashko and members of the choir programmed the ambitious concert.

"We came up with a program which we felt would depict the various varieties and styles of choral music over these past thousand years. It will give the audience an idea, perhaps, of what these composers were going through," Ewashko says.

"The vocal colour and choral sounds will be quite different through the program. It shows the flexibility of tbe choir."

The choir performs regularly with the National Arts Centre Orchestra and presents its own concert series. This season includes a Concert of Broadway, jazz and popular music, April 9, and a May 6 concert marking the 250th anniversary of J.S. Bach's death.

Ewashko, a baritone and veteran choral conductor, teaches at the University of Ottawa and prepares the chorus for Opera Lyra Ottawa's productions. Last year, on a sabbatical from his Ottawa duties, he studied with renowned German choral conductor Helmuth Rilling, and led the Vienna Choir Boys on a tour of Mexico and the United States that included a concert at Carnegie Hall.

The concert is at 8 p.m. Sunday at St. Matthew's Church, on Glebe Avenue west of Bank Street. Tickets, at $15 for adults; $10 for seniors and students, will be sold at the door. For information, call 798-7113.