Jan Harringon and University Singers
Perform Orrego-Salas's Tres cánticos sagrados
On October 10th 2004 (8:00 pm, School of Music Auer Hall) Jan Harrington will lead the IU School of Music's University Singers in a performance of Tres cánticos sagrados by Chilean composer and IU School of Music Professor Emeritus Juan Orrego Salas, who was the founder of the Latin American Music Center. This concert is part of a series of events to celebrate the 85th birthday of Orrego-Salas.
The origin of Tres cánticos sagrados Op. 108 is twofold. After conducting Orrego-Salas's oratorio The Days of God in 1976, IU professor Jan Harrington suggested to him the composition a piece for choir and a chamber instrumental ensemble.
Before Orrego-Salas started work on this new composition, he learned of the death of Chilean composer and choral conductor Alfonso Letelier (1912-1994). Before coming to the United States, Orrego-Salas had had an intensive choral activity as founder and conductor of the choir of the Universidad Católica in Chile. This situation lead to numerous interactions and collaborations with Letelier, which built a strong friendship between the two.
To honor Letelier and the friendship they established with choral music as common ground, Orrego-Salas based his composition on three sacred Latin texts: De profundis, Jesu dulci memoria, and O vos omnes . While these texts have been set to music by numerous composers, Orrego-Salas selected them with three specific settings in mind: Giovanni Palestrina's De profundis, Johann Sebastian Bach's Jesu dulcis memoria, and Tomás Luis de Victoria's O vos omnes. These are all compositions that Letelier and Orrego-Salas not only knew well and loved dearly, but also which these two friends discussed many times.
The work uses a mixed choir and an instrumental ensemble consisting of flute, clarinet, French horn, harp, percussion, and string quartet. In spite of the strong connections with previous works, the musical language remains typical of Orrego-Salas: neo-classical, colorful instrumentation, changing textures, and a close relationship between text and music. In De profundis the basses of the chorus and the low instruments of the ensemble participate in the repetition of the verse "De profundis clamavi" ("Out of the depths I have cried to thee"), while the rest of the chorus and the instrumental tutti respond "Exaudi vocem meam" ("Hear my voice"). Jesu dulcis has another character: the chorus progresses in very simple harmonies around the Benedictine hymn of the 14th century that is introduced by the basses in recitative style. From this point the texture is driven towards the "Alleluia" which represents the climax of the entire work. Orrego-Salas has taken a rather free interpretation of the text of the O vos omnes to express the suffering of all men in the transit through life. A solo of bells leads to the somber entries of the voices; henceforth, this movement develops in constant alternation of instrumental interludes and chorus. After a whispering "amen," the motif of the bells leads to an instrumental pianissimo with which the Cánticos end.
Tres cántigos sagrados was premiered on 30 June 1996 with Harrington conducting the IU School of Music's University Singers. This performance was part of Crossroads of Traditions, the second Inter-American composition workshop, organized by the Indiana University's Latin American Music Center.
The coming University Singers concert, entitled "Sacred Visions," will also include works by Mikhail Glinka (1804-1857), Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951), Sven-David Sandström (b. 1942), and Frank Martin (1890-1974). The ensemble is preparing for performances in Los Angeles at the National Conference of the American Choral Directors Association.
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