Cantata Singers bring past back to life

Cantata Singers
St. Matthew's Church, Ottawa

It's not every art that can support a credible retrospective of the second millennium. What were the great novels of the 11th century, for example, or the great films of the 15th?

But with music, and choral music in particular, we can listen to the work of artists from each of the last 100 decades, and with some degree of confidence that what we hear resembles what people of bygone times heard.

Lawrence Ewashko assembled 19 works from the last 1,000 years into a program that the Cantata Singers of Ottawa performed under his direction at St. Matthew's Church last night. And lest you think he may have been cribbing, the first offering was Victimae paschali laudes by Wipo of Burgundy, who was born in or around the year 1000 and died in 1045. There was at least one work for each subsequent century, culminating in our own, which was represented by, among others, Canada's R. Murray Schafer.

All of this would have been for naught had Ewashko and the Cantata Singers been unable to deliver plausible accounts of a huge variety of musical styles. The first few numbers, including Hildegard von Bingen's plainchant Ave generosa were especially effective, even if their approach wasn't necessarily consonant with the performance practice the experts might urge upon them.

Things were back on track with a well-felt rendition of one of the greatest of all motets, Victoria's O vos omnes, and a little off again with a rather limp rendition of Heinrich Schütz's Cantate Domine.

Make no mistake, though, the Cantata Singers are singing very well this season. To their traditional strengths of good ensemble, excellent internal tuning and fine balance, they've added a new level of confidence and authority.

As odd as it may have sounded to hear Handel's For unto us a child is born with piano accompaniment, it was impossible not to admire the singing. Bach's Jesu, joy of man's desiring came off better and, if Christopher Devlin's piano accompaniment sounded a little plodding in Mozart's Ave verum, the performance was still a pleasure.

Schubert, Verdi and Masgagni represented the 19th century (the choruses from Il Trovatore and Cavalleria Rusticana were terrific), while the 20th had Schafer, Orff and others, all reasonably well served.

Narrator Russell Baron's explanatory comments were informative, though they made some audience members restless.