CRITICAL ACCLAIM
Joan Reinthaler
May 18, 2009
As major arts organizations throughout the country struggle, a subculture of amateur music and theater groups that subsist on love and commitment is still thriving. The 20-member, Reston-based Voce Chamber Singers, which performed at Reston's St. John Neumann Catholic Church on Saturday, is one of these. The group may have tightened its purse strings somewhat (the "orchestra" here was a well-played piano), but that did not dampen the enthusiasm of either the singers or the audience, which broke into applause at almost every pause in the musical line.
The chorus — well prepared and, from their body language, apparently enjoying this music a lot…sang with a nice combination of energy, accuracy and artistry.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Voce Chamber Singers
Joan Reinthaler
Wednesday, December 19, 2007; Page C04
What the Voce Chamber Singers did at their concert Sunday at St. Timothy's Episcopal Church in Herndon shouldn't be unusual around here (it's not in other places). It should happen frequently, and all of us -- listeners, performers and composers — would be better for it. Voce performed a newly commissioned and newly premiered piece twice, once before and once after intermission. The music had a chance to define itself. The audience had a chance to get a first impression and then to listen more closely the second time, and the composer was treated with the respect deserved.
The piece was a Magnificat by Alice Parker, whose arrangements (with Robert Shaw) of folk songs and Christmas carols have always been models of simplicity and taste. This was not a setting of the Advent text, but rather a meditation on the Advent idea with bits and pieces of the Latin text surrounding a dialogue, in the sopranos and altos, between Mary and Elizabeth. True to form, Parker has kept it simple, transparent and short. The 23-voice ensemble sang it gently and with evident affection…for Biebl's "Ave Maria"…the final verse, in a well-focused pianissimo, was stunning. The singers…acquitted themselves very well.
CLASSICAL MUSIC
Joan Reinthaler
Dec. 15, 2003
Voce, a Reston-based chamber chorus conducted by Kenneth Nafziger, brought a nice mix of traditional carols and more recent music for the season to the Church of the Epiphany downtown on Friday. Nafziger had arranged his singers in mixed voice parts and…the blend and balance were good.
The big piece on the program was the five-movement "Navidad Nuestra," by Ariel Ramirez, scored in this performance for chorus and soloists, piano, guitar and percussion, and, in one movement, a flute. Aside from Randy Latimer, who was brought in for the heavy lifting in the percussion parts (and who did this very well), the instrumental and solo assignments were taken on impressively by versatile chorus members. This is a cheerful and appealing work on folklike texts, and the Voce forces sang it with evident conviction and enjoyment.
PERFORMING ARTS
Voce Chorus
Joan Reinthaler
Tuesday, February 13, 2001; Page C08
If you're a choral conductor worth your salt, you can plan a program around almost any holiday on the calendar. If, in addition, your chorus is a chamber chorus and the holiday is Valentine's Day, you have an astonishing opulence of riches at your fingertips. Composers since the beginning of musical history have celebrated love in all its pain and pleasure in works for small vocal ensembles, and many have done their best work in this idiom. Sunday at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Reston, the 26-voice chorus Voce brought an afternoon of well-selected love songs drawn from Germany, Appalachia, Scotland and the 1890s American music hall. Under the direction of Ken Nafziger, the chorus sang a group from the Brahms "Neue Liebeslieder"; arrangements by Alice Parker, Robert Shaw and others of American and Scottish folk songs; and a delightful medley from the "naughty '90s" that included "Mother Was a Lady," "Take Back Your Gold," "She Is More to Be Pitied Than Censured" and "Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!" The medley presented the chorus at its best, singing with energy, personality and real attention to the text. Pianists Barbara Bulger Verdile and Paul Patton did a splendid job throughout, and most of the 13 soloists, all drawn from the chorus, carried out their assignments admirably.
Voce Performance Honors Marriage Of Poetry, MusicJoseph McLellan, Special to The Washington Post
Thursday, February 24, 2000; Page V07
Voce, a 26-voice chorus now in its 11th season in Northern Virginia, has established a solid reputation not only for the quality of its performances but also for the ingenuity and imagination with which its programs are selected and constructed. That reputation was splendidly upheld in a program, "The Poetry of Music," performed Sunday at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Reston.
Words and music have had a partnership — sometimes an uneasy partnership involving struggles for supremacy — for nearly as long as men have been inventing poems. Not "writing" — the partnership was in effect before the invention of writing. When it began, all poems were sung, and every poet was a musician.
Through the centuries, many poems have been made about music — particularly its power of arousing and expressing our deepest feelings. And composers have returned the favor by setting some of these poems to music that illustrates what the words are about.
Four such combinations of words and music were sung by Voce: "Cantus in Harmonia" ("A Harmonious Song") by Mack Wilberg; "Peter Quince at the Clavier" by Dominick Argento; a segment of the oratorio "Solomon" by George Frideric Handel; and "Celia Singing" by David Conte.
Although three of the four works are by living composers (Argento was born in 1927, Wilberg and Conte both in 1955), the program had a pleasant flavor of antiquity. This was partly because of the composers' musical style — melodiously conservative throughout and positively medieval in "Cantus in Harmonia," which was composed last year.
There also was an archaic atmosphere in the texts they used. Three of the poems dated back to the baroque era, when the power of music was a standard poetic theme. "Cantus in Harmonia" used a text adapted from an ode by Alexander Pope.
Handel's text, adapted from the Bible, pays tribute to music's power to evoke joy, rage, sorrow and other feelings.
"Celia Singing," with a text by the 17th-century poet Thomas Carew, argues prettily that Cupid's "fatal dart" can strike through the ears (at least when Celia sings) as well as through the eyes.
The high point of the program, which had no low points, was Argento's "Peter Quince at the Clavier," a setting of one of the best American poems of the 20th century (the work of Wallace Stevens) by one of our nation's most outstanding composers of vocal music.
Like Handel's music, Argento's has a strong element of rhetoric, cleverly and sometimes hilariously illustrating the text's basic thesis that "Music is feeling…not sound." The composer created, and the chorus exemplified, a special kind of beauty in the vivid treatment of such words as "quavering."
All four selections were well interpreted, but Argento's deserved and received special deluxe treatment. It was introduced by poet Dan Johnson discussing the intricacies of the text and Voce's music director Kenneth Nofziger analyzing the music's structure and descriptive elements. The performance's charm and subtlety were greatly enhanced by these remarks.
Barbara Bulger Vedile, a member of Voce's soprano section, substituted at the keyboard on a few hours' notice, playing as though she had rehearsed the music for weeks.
Voce's will next perform the U.S. premiere of the "Misa Cubana" ("Cuban Mass") by Cuban composer Jose Maria Vitier, April 14 at St. George's Episcopal Church, Arlington, and April 15 at St. Anne's Episcopal Church, Reston.
PERFORMING ARTS
Voce Choral Ensemble In Reston
Bob WatersTuesday, December 21, 1999; Page C09
Memories of living in Poland have always been dear to this writer when it comes to the Christmas season. As the last leaves would fall from birch trees, sweet and melodious voices would begin to sing Polish Christmas carols--among the most poignantly beautiful in the world. Chopin even incorporated one — "Lulajze Jezuniu" — into his Scherzo in B Minor for piano, Op. 20. That lullaby, together with other carols from Poland, Italy, Russia, Ukraine and England, was presented Saturday in a largely a cappella concert by the Northern Virginia choral ensemble Voce.
The performance, at St. Anne's Episcopal Church in Reston, was directed by Kenneth Nafziger.
The most memorable moment of the evening came in Bob Chilcott's contemporary English song "Mid-Winter," when the choir and piano evoked images of snowflakes falling on a quiet winter day.
The sweet and lyrical voice of soprano Gretchen Newman was especially notable in William Mathias's English work "Sweet Was the Song." Soprano JoEllen Richardson gave a sensitive reading of the aforementioned Polish Christmas carol; and Barbara Verdile provided impeccable intonation and atmosphere with her flute and piccolo…Most of the time the ensemble sang sensitively, and its employment of dynamic nuance helped give melodic lines a distinguished and ethereal sense of lightness and grace.
Voce, Getting In the Spirit
Joan Reinthaler
Tuesday, March 4, 1997; Page B03
As an ensemble, Voce has many strengths, not the least of which is excellent diction and the ability to sing softly with energy. Its performance of Daniel Gawthrop's "Sing Me to Heaven," which the chorus commissioned some years ago…was the high point of the concert and demonstrated Voce's ability to sing well-focused unisons and to sustain a sense of movement through the silence of a rest in the musical line. There was a great deal to admire in the Bach…among which were Hunter's well-planned pacing and the transparency of the counterpoint in the central movement, "Ihr aber seid nicht fleischlich." Faure's "Cantique de Jean Racine," with splendid cello accompaniment by Allan Malmberg, was lovely. Sonorities were beautifully balanced in the Tallis "If You Love Me"…There was a wonderfully visceral drive in Aguiar's Ginastera-inspired setting of Psalm 150…
