The area’s large, well-known classical music presenters tend to stick to familiar, mainstream works because they must generate robust enough ticket sales to cover a significant portion of their sizable operational costs.
Thus, it usually falls to smaller-budget, niche ensembles to venture into lesser-known sections of the repertory, and they typically have the kind of devoted and intrepid followers who are willing to go along on such musical adventures.
One of the most respected such organizations is the Boulder-based Ars Nova Singers, which specializes in music from the Renaissance and the 20th and 21st centuries. It often draws unexpected connections between the two eras and spotlights unfairly forgotten or overlooked choral gems.
In that spirit, Ars Nova presented two performances over the weekend of a highly unusual and imaginative program, “Requiem: The Journey of Souls.” (Reviewed here is Saturday evening’s performance at St. John’s Episcopal Church in Boulder.)
It highlighted three lesser- known requiems. Like nearly all works in this form, two were musical settings of the Catholic Mass for the dead, but a third, Herbert Howells’ Requiem (1935), employs a six-section text drawing on the Book of Psalms and Salvator Mundi from the medieval Sarum Rite.
Requiems, such as the famous one by Giuseppe Verdi, can be grand, sweeping edifices, but others are smaller, more intimate pieces. Certainly, all three of these examples fit into that latter category, especially Jean Richafort’s virtually unknown Requiem for Six Voices, which was published in 1532.
This subtle work, with its tightly interwoven counterpoint and contained emotions, requires impeccable blend, balance and intonation to pull off, and it got all three in Ars Nova’s sensitive, refined interpretation.
A concert devoted to requiems might sound like a dreary, monochromatic affair, but this was one neither. While certainly elegiac at times, these works were also uplifting and inspiring, and, though adhering to a largely fixed format, they were varied in tone and style.
The most overtly dramatic of three, Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Messe di Requiem (1922), was highlighted by a long Dies Irae, with Ars Nova compellingly negotiating its vivid emotional hills and valleys.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
