Review by Peter Jacobi for Bloomington Herald-Times For 24 years, Gerald Sousa has challenged the Bloomington Chamber Singers with musical assignments that should have been beyond their abilities. After all, the choir consists of amateurs who give of their time and energy after hours in an endeavor set apart from their professional pursuits and qualifications. But this music director refuses to accept limitations. Instead, year after year, he has sought challenges for his ensemble, the likes of Bach’s B Minor Mass, Beethoven’s “Missa Solemnis,” Mozart’s C Minor Mass, Orff’s “Carmina Burana” and all sorts of mixed programs featuring music from very long ago and of today. That tradition continued this past weekend with two performances of “Annelies,” a musical setting by British composer James Whitbourn of Anne Frank’s diary. Maestro Sousa had been drawn to the piece from the moment he heard of its existence. But the original shape of “Annelies,” for large chorus and orchestra, he felt, was wrong for his singers. He set the idea aside but then heard that Whitbourn was creating a version of smaller scope: for chorus and four instrumentalists: violin, cello, clarinet and piano. Sousa pounced. He obtained the rights for a regional premiere and began to train his forces. Lo and behold, the result is what two Bloomington audiences — one on Saturday evening, the other Sunday afternoon — experienced in a most unusual concert venue, a huge and empty space on South Rogers called the Warehouse. The stage was laden with chairs of all shapes and sizes, one for each member of the Chamber Singers. Here and there, one saw a table or a kitchen counter, something from a household, something to suggest a domicile and hiding place. We were meant to be with Anne, with Annelies. From both sides of the stage, screens reflected photos of the girl and of scenes from the haunted 1930s and ’40s: families of Jews before and after their internment, camps and prisoners, hints of the Holocaust. Whitbourn’s music, set to a persuasive libretto by Melanie Challenger that stretches from “The capture foretold” to “The capture and the concentration camp” and “Anne’s meditation,” ranges from the playful and the ominous to the sad and mournful. The harmonies may occasionally jar, but this score is meant to convince and jar with content, not with musical modernism. Convince it does. At the center of the performance was Elizabeth Toy, a soprano from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, whom many of us have seen in IU Opera Theater productions. She was this production’s Annelies, and she was remarkable in projecting, through music and manner, the unquenchable faith that this young girl exhibited throughout the years of hiding, the innate goodness she sustained right to the end, when the world around her turned into horror and hell. Toy’s voice embraced the role, both Anne’s engaging youth and the beyond-her-years maturity that circumstances forced upon her. Sousa’s devoted choristers sang with tremendous fervor and cast a spell unbroken until, after the final notes and a long silence, the applause rang out. The instrumentalists — violinist Muriel Mikelsons, cellist Adriana Contino, clarinetist Iura de Rezende and pianist Alice Baldwin — were marvelous, adding to the sought-for moods demanded by story and music. A remarkable occasion!
Posted on: Sat, 19 Apr 2014 02:41:03 +0000
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