Marian songs unite two choirs

Half an hour before the beginning of the concert on Sunday afternoon, 8 December, most of the seats in Zug's St. Johannes der Taufer (St. John the Baptist) church were already filled; by 5 pm, there was not even a single empty chair in the most unfavourable corners, and some people even had to experience the approximately one-hour programme standing.

The opening Gregorian chant, an anonymous work from the High and Late Middle Ages, was followed by 16 works dedicated to the Virgin Mary by various composers from the 16th century to the present day. The intervening periods of baroque, classical and early romanticism were not represented. The common theme of the ‘a capella’ (unaccompanied) works was mostly sung at a slow temp, with the musical emphasis mostly placed on the overall choir, and more rarely on the two alternating choirs; solo passages by particularly gifted singers from the choirs were not central here, and both choirs demonstrated their linguistic flexibility, switching between Latin, English, German and Church Slavonic.

The Audite Nova Zug choir has almost a hundred singers. As in previous appearances, all registers were well represented and the choir stood out through its excellent preparation. The choir has now existed over several decades, and even though some members are getting a bit old in the meantime, its choir master, Johannes Meister, knows how to fully compensate for this through intensive vocal training. Considering its size, the choir proved to be very flexible, and, through the intonation, the words of the works could be clearly understood. Even in the more exposed entrances, the individual registers were fully present from the very first note. A special compliment is due to the consistently good intonation of the top notes in the soprano. The bass could have been allowed a little more volume, especially in the deep fortissimo entrances in the Bruckner motet, as the composer intended, but hardly ever achieved in practice.

                    The Audite Nova Zug choir (at a previous concert)

The Zug Chamber Choir is much smaller, and consists of exactly 20 singers, including three members who sang with both choirs and repeatedly moved from one to the other. Johannes Meister is also the choir master here. With the shorter common distance there was much more tonal variability between the individual, mostly privately trained singers, which was also somewhat desirable. The intonation fell apart just once – in the first stanza of the Grieg motet - but this was mainly corrected in the next section. The double-choir works were surprisingly homogeneous, where the numerical imbalance was very well balanced in tone.

The content of the works almost literally repeated themselves, although the composers came from very different epochs. You could see that this did not happen by accident, however, from the very beginning. The "Ave Maria" by the Renaissance composer Jacob Arcadelt (1505-1568) found a harmoniously almost seamless continuation in the work of the late Romantic composer Sergej Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), whose "Bogoroditse Devo" led to a powerful emotional climax.

Johannes Meister gave the community leader, Bernhard Lenfers Grünenfelder, "carte blanche" for his introductory and interim words; that meant that the choir and the conductor did not know in advance what he would contribute. Above all, he used the expression “Weile” (spending a period of time or a ‘while’) to emphasize that Advent should also serve as a time to find one another spiritually, just as Mary did with Saint Elizabeth, who was also bearing a child. The contemplative experience stood at the centre. From this point of view, it was logical that, despite the loud and sustained final applause at the end, an encore was not performed.

Report by Jürg Röthlisberger