“It is spring,” the alto soloist sang and the chorus repeated near the end of a performance of Michael Tippett’s oratorio “A Child of Our Time” at Carnegie Hall on Friday evening. And indeed it was, to the day.
So it was as good a time as any to celebrate renewal, as embodied in a young chorus of 180, comprising groups participating in the Carnegie Hall National High School Choral Festival: the Pebblebrook High School Chamber Choir of Atlanta; the North Jersey Homeschool Association Chorale of Hawthorne, N.J.; the Shorewood High School Aeolian Choir of Shoreline, Wash.; and Songs of Solomon: An Inspirational Ensemble, of Manhattan. Part of “Honor!,” the three-week Carnegie festival organized by Jessye Norman, who introduced the program, the concert was presented by the Weill Music Institute, Carnegie’s educational arm, which is offering a related program in schools, “African- American Song: Spirituals and Anthems of Freedom.”
This is where Tippett fits in, for — profoundly English though he was — he used black American spirituals to punctuate “A Child of Our Time” in much the way Bach used Lutheran chorales in his Passions: to lend a certain universality to the specifics of the story. In truth, though, almost the whole of Tippett’s work transcends the particular.
The oratorio, which takes its title from a short novel by the Hungarian anti-Nazi writer Odon von Horvath, was a response to events in November 1938: the killing of a German diplomat by a young Jew in Paris and the unspeakable reprisals of Kristallnacht in Germany. But the closest Tippett came to portraying specific characters was, in the central section, to call the vocal soloists Boy, Mother, Aunt and Uncle. The Boy shoots an official, the bass recounts as the narrator, and “they took a terrible vengeance.” The Child of Our Time, it emerges, is the scapegoat.
That blessed arrival of spring comes after a long, arduous winter of the soul, the only consolations being those spirituals, evoking not only the suffering of American blacks in slavery and of ancient Jews in captivity but also the remarkable resilience of the human spirit. The youngsters in the chorus captured it all every bit as movingly as the more experienced soloists: Angela M. Brown, soprano; Meredith Arwady, contralto; Russell Thomas, tenor; and Morris Robinson, bass. The choral specialist Craig Jessop conducted, and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s played with its usual understated brilliance.
In the first half of the program the choruses took turns on stage to sing two or three numbers each, mostly a cappella. It was a good opportunity to drink in the spirit of youth as well as to make the acquaintance of unfamiliar composers or works, including a couple of standouts: Frank Ticheli’s “Earth Song,” from the Pebblebrook chorus, and Eric Whitacre’s “Lux Aurumque,” from the North Jersey contingent.
There were also arrangements of spirituals, and laudable attempts at soulful stylings. But even those who hadn’t heard some of the groups at a concert for schoolchildren at the Apollo Theater in Harlem on Friday morning probably knew who would win at that game.
Songs of Solomon, a group composed of students from various New York high schools, appeared last, happily, for it would have been an impossible act to follow. Conducted by Chantel Wright, it sustained attention through “Jesus Is King,” an initially fascinating but ultimately overlong gloss on Handel’s “Hallelujah” chorus by Glenn Edward Burleigh. But it positively brought the house down in William L. Dawson’s “Ezekiel Saw de Wheel”: an earlier spring before Tippett’s winter.
