Music Review

One can’t help but feel rather suspicious of a concert program that features solely foreign composers. For one, audiences have a tendency to feel somehow cheated by music that is sung in a foreign language, as if music sung in a English is more immediately profound due to the inability to comprehend the text. Likewise it is natural for critics to feel disdainful of performers for their blatant avoidance of the difficulties of an unfamiliar language.

Such attitudes, while valid, lose all relevance when contemplating the program the Florida International University School of Music presented on Thursday, February 15, 2007 in Wertheim Performing Arts Center, Concert Hall. It is to the great credit of Sam Spears, the conductor of the University Chorale, and John Augenblick, conductor of the Concert Choir, that the hour and a half concert presented music which was deeply moving of classic foreign music. Because foreign vocal works are by nature generally less familiar than their orchestral counterparts, it was admirable that the program sensitively incorporated several well-known works to complement the largely unfamiliar works which made up the bulk of the concert.

The precision of the ensemble snapped the audience to attention with the antiphonal setting of Psalm 114. Each verse is presented in both Sephardic (Judeo-Spanish) and Gregorian chant (Latin Schьtz, the former's tortured chromatics and counterpoint is juxtaposed with the lilting homophonic voices of the latter, ending appropriately with a chorale text by Robert Ray. Here, as well as in the seamless double-choir exchanges of “Gospel Magnificat” the University Chorale and Concert Choir excelled, negotiating the intricate harmonic shifts with clarity and facility born of their experience with Baroque choral music.

My review of this concert was extra ordinary. In my opinion this was a well done performance and a well thought out theme. The theme was “Choral Contrast.” Antiphonal and spatial effects, in songs of Life and Death, Love and Life and Death, Love and Loss, Joy