THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, April 3, 1995 TAG: 9504030036
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Music Review
SOURCE: By MARK MOBLEY, MUSIC CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 51 lines
The hammer dulcimer is a humble yet magical instrument. It sounds like a distant piano. It has the ringing, folksy quality of a harp and a memory that stretches back to antiquity.
Children's voices are just as wondrous. Malcolm Dalglish, a dulcimer virtuoso and former boy soprano, combined the two in his ``Hymnody of Earth,'' performed Sunday at Christ & St. Luke's Church in Norfolk by the Virginia Children's Chorus.
Young singers from the Baltimore-area St. Paul's Schools made up half the choir, which was dressed in shirts of blue, green, brown and rust. Dalglish himself played, sang and occasionally conducted. He was joined by master percussionist and Paul Winter Consort member Glen Velez, who made hand drums drone, buzz and sing.
The concert repeated a program performed Friday night in Baltimore by the same forces. Given the travel, the chance to work with important artists, the difficulty of the music and the audience's enthusiasm, it had to be the kind of weekend a student performer lives for.
Dalglish, a Windham Hill recording artist known for performing with the folk trio Metamora, drew on a variety of sources for the nearly hourlong ``Hymnody.'' The title refers to the singing of hymns, and the words are mostly culled from poems of Kentucky writer Wendell Berry that find the divine in nature. The music sits between Britten's ``A Ceremony of Carols'' - the work ``Hymnody'' clearly aspires to be - Bernstein's pop-influenced ``Mass'' and folk music.
Dalglish has an ear for rhythm. Both his playing and his song writing have drive and dancing, glancing hesitations. His songs to Berry's words are more convincing than the ones he wrote to his own lyrics, such as the warm, fuzzy ``Window Tree.''
The middle school and high school aged children - mostly girls - sang with exuberance, though not with a lot of volume, for Virginia Children's Chorus director Carol Thomas Downing and Margie T. Farmer of the St. Paul's schools. The long program, including a first-half selection of folk songs and originals, was sung with a pop-music airiness. MEMO: MUSIC REVIEW
The Virginia Children's Chorus and guests in ``Hymnody of Earth'' by
Malcolm Dalglish, Sunday at Christ & St. Luke's Church, Norfolk. For
more information about children's chorus activities, call 397-0779. by CNB