Wisconsin Chamber Choir presents:
The Creation by Joseph Haydn
Saturday, April 2, 7:30 pm
Madison Masonic Center
310 Wisconsin Avenue
Tickets: $22 advance/$25 door (Students $12/$15)
Joseph Haydn’s masterpiece, The Creation, is beloved for its thrilling choruses, picturesque musical details, and uplifting message about the bounty and harmony of the natural world. Joining the Wisconsin Chamber Choir in this performance are a stellar cast of soloists including Deanna Horjus-Lang, Brian Leeper, and J. Adam Shelton; the voices of the Stoughton Chamber Singers; and a professional orchestra comprising members of the Madison Symphony and the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra. Haydn’s sublime oratorio will ring out in the historic ambiance of the Madison’s Masonic Center Auditorium, the former home of the Madison Symphony.
The WCC’s presentation of Haydn’s Creation builds on their critically acclaimed rendition of J. S. Bach’s St. John Passion in April, 2010. Writing in Isthmus, critic John W. Barker praised the choir’s Bach performance as “superbly disciplined, of beautifully balanced sonority . . . a remarkably consistent, coherent, and artistically splendid achievement.” Barker concludes, “[Artistic Director Robert Gehrenbeck] and his choir should be proud of establishing for themselves a more glowing status than ever in Madison’s musical life.” This concert by the WCC was Madison’s first performance of the St. John Passion using baroque instruments.
On Wednesday, March 30, WCC Artistic Director Robert Gehrenbeck will be heard over the airwaves, first from 7:00-7:45 on WORT 89.9 FM as a guest on the choral music show, A Musical Offering, and then again at noon on WERN 88.7 FM as a guest on The Midday. Tune in to hear Gehrenbeck discuss the WCC’s upcoming performance of Haydn’s Creation and to hear selections from the oratorio.
On May 20, the WCC will conclude their season-long exploration of “Music and the Natural World” with a concert focused on Native American composers and poets. The concert’s title, “She Is One of Us,” comes from a powerful work by Mohican composer Brent Michael Davids, who grew up in Wisconsin. This concert will also feature music by other indigenous composers from around the world, along with Songs of Nature by Antonín Dvořák, the great Czech composer who took a keen interest in Native American music during his stay in the US in the 1890s.
In The Creation, widely considered to be Haydn’s masterpiece, the composer treats his sublime subject matter with inexhaustible inventiveness. The oratorio’s overture, a musical representation of chaos, contains some of the most haunting, unusual music the eighteenth century ever produced. The most dramatic moment in the entire score, the creation of light, follows shortly thereafter, in a blaze of brass, timpani, and choral fortissimos. Each of the succeeding movements shows Haydn’s undying cheerfulness in a different way. Audience members will have their own favorite moments, whether they be the grand choral fugues, the lyrical peons to the newly created world sung by the soloists, Adam and Eve’s sprightly love duets, or the humorous characterizations of individual animals matched by appropriate orchestrations. Haydn’s music will move, inspire, and entertain all those in attendance.
The WCC’s April 2nd performance will be a unique collaboration between one of Madison’s leading choral ensembles, a cast of nationally-known soloists, an orchestra composed of southern Wisconsin’s leading instrumentalists, and a partner choir, the Stoughton Chamber Singers. WCC Artistic Director Robert Gehrenbeck has conducted numerous critically acclaimed performances of oratorios and operas from the Baroque, Classical, and Romantic eras. The charming details of Haydn’s score will spring to life under his direction, while listeners will be moved by the music’s bold, dramatic sweep. Soprano Deanna Horjus-Lang has performed extensively in Europe and the US, including appearances with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Baritone Brian Leeper has performed over twenty major roles with symphonies and opera companies in the US and abroad, including a national radio broadcast performance of Candide with the Cleveland Orchestra. Tenor J. Adam Shelton has performed numerous roles with companies such as Des Moines Metro Opera and the University of Wisconsin Opera Theatre, as well as appearances in Novafeltria, Italy with La Musica Lirica. Also joining in the Creation performance are two talented local singers, UW-Madison Masters student Michael Roemer as Adam, and WCC member Madeline Olson as Eve.
The origin of Haydn’s oratorio is a fascinating tale in itself. Inspired by the monumental performances of Handel’s Messiah and Israel in Egypt that Haydn witnessed during his extended visits to London in the 1790s, he desired to compose something of equal worth for audiences in his native Austria. During his last London sojourn Haydn was given an English libretto on the Biblical account of creation, which Haydn’s friend, Baron von Swieten, translated into German after Haydn returned to Vienna in 1795. After The Creation’s completion and enthusiastic early reception in Vienna, von Swieten produced a new English version to match Haydn’s music, and the work was published bilingually, in German and English. But because von Swieten’s retranslation of the libretto into English was less than idiomatic (neither Haydn nor von Swieten spoke English well), Gehrenbeck and the WCC have chosen to perform Haydn’s oratorio in the excellent revised English version completed by the American conductor, Robert Shaw.
