A tapestry of sounds

Nuit d'étoiles, sous tes voiles, 

Sous ta brise et tes parfums, 

Triste lyre qui soupire, 

Je rêve aux amours défunts.

This is the first verse of a poem set to music by Claude Debussy and sung in an arrangement for three female voices at St. Joseph's Church on July 8th. It was the third item of a reflective programme presented by a group known as Tapestry, of four women from Boston (singers, one of them also a viola player) and two men (a young Russian pianist and a clarinetist). They have won prestigious awards, and have performed in Ottawa before. Their selection of music was called Beyond Borders: Songs of Hope and Peace and it had also been performed at the National Gallery in Washington, DC, on Armistice Day last year. It had a sort of anti-war theme, but did not include any music from Germany, which might have made it seem more complete in the context of their theme.

The concert began with a piano solo, an extract from Ravel's Le tombeau de Couperin, composed during the 1st world war, and with no pause a clarinet solo followed. We heard a variety of piano, viola, voice and clarinet pieces after that, including a Satie Gnossienne, an arrangement of Debussy's Noël des enfants qui n'ont plus de maison for vocal trio again, and some extracts from Bartok's Bagatelles for piano. John McCutcheon's composition Christmas in the Trenches was for singers in four parts, with the viola held and played like a guitar in accompaniment. An arrangement by Virgil Thomson of Psalm 23 was for all six musicians; then came another clarinet solo. Thus ended the first part of the concert.

Most likely, at my age, my hearing is deteriorating; I found it difficult to make out the singers' words in this concert, partly because of the acoustics of the church and also because the ensemble seems to specialise in soft singing. The soprano Christi Catt seems to have a thinner voice than the other two singers. These are minor quibbles; their musicianship was exemplary.

The second part began with a Pastorale by Poulenc, followed by a viola solo. leading to a medieval Agnus Dei from Spain with the clean, open harmonies of its time.

To contrast with that, a Dona Nobis Pacem by Vaughan Williams with his distinctive early 20th century harmonies and (a bigger contrast yet) a Duke Ellington number, Mood Indigo, sung, with piano and clarinet backing. The clarinetist came straight back in with solo improvisations by Charles Mingus, after which we heard the four women singing a Billie Holiday song from the 1940s in close-harmony, barbershop style.

Talk about variety! The pianist, from memory, then impressed everyone with No. 2 of the Etudes Tableaux by Rachmaninoff, and then we had two Samuel Barber pieces, the first (Sure on this Shining Night, 1938) with a Finzi-like accompaniment on the clarinet and viola. When the voices joined in the clarinet became the lowest voice. Barber's lovely Agnus Dei immediately followed and finally the ensemble gave us a soft arrangement (sung in three parts) of Somewhere from West Side Story, by Bernstein.