Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, April 19, 1993 TAG: 9304190008
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SETH WILLIAMSON SPECIAL TO THE ROANOKE TIMES & WORLD-NEWS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Blacksburg composer Jon Polifrone's "Requiem: For those we love" was premiered before a crowd that was clearly moved by the work and gave the composer and performers thundering applause and bravos.
Performing forces included the Blacksburg Master Chorale, the Virginia Tech University Concert Choir, the Montgomery County Boychoir, a 33-piece orchestra, mezzo-soprano Emily Lodine, tenor Gary Fulsebakke and baritone Jeffrey Ambrosini. Craig Fields conducted the piece, which will shortly be a Pulitzer Prize nominee.
It's notoriously difficult to predict the future of a work of art, but Polifrone's "Requiem" stands as good a chance of lasting as any new work I have heard in recent years. In its breadth of appeal and depth of expression it can be compared to Joonas Kokkonen's "Requiem," whose American premiere was conducted a few years ago in Roanoke by Jeffrey Sandborg.
Polifrone's masterpiece showed its creator to be among those contemporary composers who are determined to recapture the audience that once belonged to the likes of Britten, Hindemith (and now Kokkonen, among others).
Polifrone knows how to use dissonance, but his harmonic vocabulary is essentially in the tradition of Britten. And though he told an interviewer that the work's title was not meant to recall Hindemith (Polifrone's title is the subtitle of the older composer's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"), the piece does echo the German composer's language. In the "Requiem" he has achieved an idiom that is unmistakably contemporary, yet accessible to a wide range of listeners.
One caveat: it seemed on first exposure that Polifrone's interpolation of Helen McGaughey's poetry into the requiem text is not, finally, as successful as what Britten achieved with Wilfrid Owen's poetry in the "War Requiem." Though the little-known poet's words were moving, they did not illuminate with the same irony and affirmation the basic text.
But the music was by turns powerful and deeply moving. After mezzo Emily Lodine sang McGaughey's prelude, tubular bells introduced a three-note motif that was to be the basis for much that followed. The full-throated choir entered with the words "Requiem aeternam" to a gravely beautiful melody, as the passing bells continued throughout the section. After baritone Jeffrey Ambrosini sang "Te decet hymnus," the full choir finished the introit with a gorgeous chromatic passage.
The loveliness of this work took me by surprise. There was a wild and forlorn, even haunting, beauty to Polifrone's setting of the "Kyrie." And the work was full of such moments, for example the transition from the harsh dissonance at the beginning of "Libera eas de ore leonis" to the sweeter acapella midsection to the section's calm, plainchant-like ending.
Or the glowing beauty of the boys' voices floating high over the rest of the choir during the "Lux aeterna" (which started with the same three-note motif that began the work).
The most successful of McGaughey's poems was the final interlude: "Green is the grave where my love is lying / With fettered lips and unheeding ear. / How shall he know the seasons passing? / Ice in my heart at the spring of the year."
Tenor Gary Fulsebakke joined mezzo Lodine on the final phrase "at the spring of the year," while the full choir sang "Requiem aeternam at the spring of the year" for a dramatic and powerful finish.
Seth Williamson produces feature news stories and a classical music program on public radio station WVTF (89.1 FM) in Roanoke.
by CNB