To mark its centennial year the Dessoff Choirs delved into its 1920s playbook. Back then the choir’s concerts included lieder as well as choral music. So on Thursday night music director and conductor Malcolm J. Merriweather and longtime Dessoff pianist Steven Ryan opened a wide-ranging program that culminated in a cantata by Florence Price with a set of lieder.
Mr. Merriweather’s velvety baritone unveiled the depths in art songs by Richard Strauss and Robert Schumann, and also by two composers less often heard in this form, Alma Mahler and Clara Schumann. Some of the works in this historically informed concert were in the Dessoff repertoire in the 1920s. And how fitting that a program focusing on Price, the once-obscure African American composer whose works have had a flowering in recent years, should also spotlight women composers of earlier times.
Women’s Compositions, Women’s Voices
Like her instrumental oeuvre, Clara Schumann’s brief love song “Sie liebten sich beide” (“They loved one another”) revealed, in Merriweather’s poignant performance, a slice of the talent that could have been realized much more mightily had the customs of her day encouraged women composers.
The most remarkable moment in the set of lieder, however, came during Robert Schumann’s “Widmung,” when Merriweather softened his voice near to silence with the words (in translation) “You are repose, you are peace / You are bestowed on me from heaven,” a dramatic turn from the raw emotion of the opening lines “You my soul, you my heart / You my rapture, O you my pain.” I wondered indeed if those sitting in the back could even hear him then, though the heights of Union Theological Seminary’s James Chapel may well have carried the sound.
After a delicate reading by Ryan of a Chopin nocturne, the chapel did indeed resound as Merriweather played some Bach on the church organ, music that featured the instrument’s low notes. These keyboard instrumentals made yet another break from standard choir programming.
The meat of the program commenced with the sopranos and altos singing Schubert’s “Psalm 23” and Brahms’ “Vier Gesänge für Frauenchor” op. 17. The first of the four Brahms songs features stormy piano accompaniment that exemplifies the passion we might call “Brahmsian.” The choir’s high voices sang with feeling and assurance, with Merriweather crafting excellent balance. The powerful a cappella swells of “Der Gärtner” and the vivid imagery of “Gesang aus Fingal” (an oddly Irish theme for the German composer) were among the aspects of the performance that brought out the women singers’ considerable strengths.
Florence Price and Abraham Lincoln
Nothing if not versatile, the full choir assembled a cappella for a 16th-century motet by Vicente Lusitano, whom scholars acknowledge as the first published Black composer. This highlight of the concert reveled in strong and well balanced vocal colors illuminating a serious but not somber recitation of words of praise to the Virgin Mary. (Coincidentally, the last time I heard music by Lusitano it was at the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, courtesy of the Gesualdo Six.)
The cantata Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight featured the full choir with soloists from among its ranks. It’s a setting by Florence Price of a poem by Vachel Lindsay. I’ve heard a lot of Price’s music in the past few years – programming her is becoming almost de rigueur (thank goodness the political crackdown on DEI hasn’t trickled down to New York City’s choral music scene). But I was not aware of this work.
While I don’t think it’s peak Price, I enjoyed the performance quite a bit. It begins with a solo baritone introducing a “bronzed, lank man” in a “suit of ancient black,” but that leads to a vigorous, rather overlong and honestly not-too-interesting piano introduction, to which Ryan nevertheless gave his all. As the six movements reel out, jazzy notes appear here and there, as in the piano introduction to the third movement (“He Cannot Sleep”), amid Price’s folk-influenced neoclassical language.
It sounded to me as if Price grew more inspired the further she progressed in composing the cantata. The most powerful moments came in the fourth movement, “His Head is Bowed,” and the last, “Who Will Bring White Peace?” I’m not sure what Lindsay meant by “white” here but I don’t think it has a racial sense. Rather, I suspect it’s meant to contrast with the darkness of the president’s “suit of ancient black…high top-hat and plain worn shawl.” The penultimate stanza finds Lincoln carrying “on his shawl-wrapped shoulders now / The bitterness, the folly and the pain.”
In the final stanza “it breaks his heart that kings must murder still…who will bring white peace / That he may sleep upon his hill again?” Price’s setting here displays chordal majesty worthy of Handel; I felt I could sense the composer pouring all her power into the music. It was a glittering, muscular end to an energetic celebration of 100 years of music from the Dessoff Choirs, sustaining the high quality and thoughtful programming that have characterized the ensemble for a century and continue under Mr. Merriweather’s exceptional leadership.
Visit the Dessoff Choirs online for information about upcoming performances, which include the Verdi Requiem and a Tania León world premiere.
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