The radio is turned on while driving the twists and turns of a Coldstream neighbourhood.
The CBC radio show, as it turns out, is featuring Newfoundland’s Lady Cove Choir, which is representing Canada at the ninth World Symposium on Choral Music in Argentina this summer.
On the program being advertised, the choir plans to sing a composition by a certain renowned Latvian-Canadian composer, coincidently the same subject whom this reporter is late in meeting for a scheduled appointment that very moment.
Upon arriving and informing him of the radio program, which played and talked about his music, he is genuinely surprised and casually says he may have to miss it as he has to teach a lesson that same afternoon.
It’s not unusual for Imant Raminsh’s name to come up in conversations about choral music. After all he is one of the most celebrated composers in this country, whose music has been performed by prestigious choirs from around the world.
Just recently, Raminsh returned from the coast where he attended the premiere of his six-part choral piece, The Mystical Bond, performed by the Vancouver Chamber Choir.
Commissioned from a grant through the Arts Legacy fund (a provincial government incentive set up during the Vancouver Winter Olympics), each of the six parts was written in a different language, including Mandarin.
The work was quite a challenge for both him and the singers, Raminsh said, but today he would rather talk about the work of his fellow composers who hail from his birth country of Latvia and other eastern European nations.
It’s the music local audiences will hear when the group he founded and conducts, the Aura Chamber Choir, presents Under the Eastern Sun May 14.
“Eastern Europe has a broad spectrum of composers that have risen in the 20th and 21st centuries,” said Raminsh, naming Estonia’s Arvo Pärt, Poland’s Henryk Górecki, and fellow Latvian Peteris Vasks as three composers who have made great strides in the choral world.
“They are all names known on the international scene, but their work is very demanding and not often done by small choirs…. (However,) for us to avoid doing this music would be an even greater mistake.”
Pärt’s music, in particular, takes concentration, with the choir having to adapt to beat changes every second bar and other nuances specific to the composer, said Raminsh.
For its upcoming concert, Aura will perform Pärt’s 1978 composition Spiegel im Spiegel known for its “tintinnabuli” (the Latin word for bells), which comes from the composer’s mystical experiences with chant music.
“The sound of bells and the sonorities make it feel like you are looking through a stained glass window and seeing the changing colours as the sun passes,” said Raminsh.
“(Pärt’s) music is frozen in time with these suspended sonorities. It had breadth to it… It happens slowly and the effect is accumulative. It sustains.”
For Aura member Sharon McMurtry, who has been with the choir for 20 of its 32 years and has been researching the pieces Aura will perform at its concert, the opportunity to sing such complex and beautiful music is an honour.
“It’s exciting for choir members to stand in that aural landscape. The sounds around you are wonderful,” she said.
“This is a concert of composers whose work came to an impasse from the domination of the Soviet Union. They were performing neo-classical during the Soviet years, and the 12-tone sound was not acceptable.”
After the break up of the Soviet, their music was able to flourish, where they went back to the tonal influence from the early days of folk tradition, added McMurtry.
“It is music that is very listenable. It’s a mass of sound, and you can hear the outside influences as well as they were able to travel more and see the world.”
Aura will open its program with some sacred music, including a movement of the Missa Brevis (short mass) by Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly that will progress to Totus Tuus by the recently deceased Górecki, which he wrote and performed for the visit made by the late Pope John Paul II to Poland in 1987.
The choir will also perform a piece written by Latvian Renate Strivrina, who recently studied in Krakow and whom Raminsh says is one of the eastern European composers coming up on the international scene.
The second half of the program includes a varied mix of music, including an aboriginal song based on ancient Estonian rhythms by Veljo Tormis, Song of The Horseman from the Suite de Lorca by Finnish composer Einojuhan Rautavaara, a short set of Hungarian folk songs by Mátyás Seiber and some Slovak folk songs by Hungary’s Béla Bartok.
And it just wouldn’t be a true Aura concert if the choir didn’t sing at least one composition by its esteemed leader.
Under the Eastern Sun is actually a play on words to Raminsh’s Under the Baltic Sun, which he originally wrote for Toronto’s Festival Baltica in 2007.
As an explorer of choral music, Raminsh says one of the things he likes to discover is the relationship between the sounds of music and how they are expressed in nuances and phrasing. And he didn’t have to twist too many arms to get his choir members to sing in all four of the Baltic languages.
“I feel to experience the work you should sing it in its original language with the greatest understanding of the language as possible,” said Raminsh.
And if that means singing in Mandarin as the Vancouver Chamber Choir did, so be it.
The Aura Chamber Choir, with accompanist Marjorie Close, presents Under the Eastern Sun May 14 at 7:30 at Vernon’s All Saints Anglican Church. Admission is $15, students and children are free, available at the door or in advance at the Ticket Seller, 549-7469, www.ticketseller.ca.
