Review: Tucson's True Concord opens 20th season with American songs

We’re pretty sure a big chunk of the audience at Grace St. Paul’s Episcopal Church Saturday night was suppressing the urge to jump out of the pews and dance in the aisles at the end of True Concord Voices & Orchestra’s “Songs of America” concert.

We’re also pretty sure that True Concord founder and Music Director Eric Holtan wouldn’t have minded that one bit.

He and the two dozen choristers on stage performing the opening concert of the professional ensemble’s 20th anniversary season made Grace St. Paul’s sanctuary feel like an old-fashioned tent revival when they sang William Dawson’s uplifting spiritual “Ain’-a That Good News!,” a toe-tapping, hand-clapping soul-lifting tune that dares you not send out a few hallelujahs and amens.

The song came at the end of a concert on Saturday, Oct. 14, that took the notion of “Songs of America” and applied it to today’s America. The program wasn’t all red, white and blue; it was green, white and red when alto Keely Rhodes sang the traditional Mexican folk song “La Llorona,” about a vengeful ghost lurking around the waterfronts mourning the loss of the children she killed to spite her cheating husband. Rhodes’ nuanced alto expressed the emotional angst and regret of the mother’s grief as if she had personally experienced it.

It was the defeaning silence of Raven Chacon’s “Voiceless Mass,” whose dissonance, brought out by the dark moan of Jim Karrer’s double bass and Theodore Buchholz’s cello coming from the back of the hall and the thumping percussion from Homero Cerón’s timpani on one side of the stage and fellow percussionist Paul Gibson’s arsenal of metallic clanging and banging on the other side, with organist Guy Whatley added the religious atonement on Grace St. Paul’s pipe organ.

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And it was re-enforced by the world premiere of American-born Canadian composer Nicholas Ryan Kelly’s sublimely beautiful “A World That Shimmers,” a piece True Concord commissioned from Kelly after he won the ensemble’s annual Stephen Paulus Emerging Composers Competition. Kelly set to music the text of New Mexico poet Janet Ruth’s poem of the same name that won True Concord’s inaugural poetry competition.

The complementary melodic voices of Buchholz’s cello and pianist Alexander Tenster accompanied the 24-voice choir as they sang about building bridges by celebrating diversity and standing united.

Holtan opened Saturday’s concert, which True Concord performed in Green Valley on Friday, Oct. 13, and repeated at Grace on Sunday, Oct. 15, with Randall Thompson’s mid-20th century song suite “Frostiana.” The seven-song cycle celebrated all the pleasures of life in Anytown, USA, which set the table for True Concord’s Southwest premiere of Chacon’s Pulitizer Prize-winning “Voiceless Mass.”

Chacon’s piece mourned the atrocities committed against Native Americans by the Catholic Church and other white institutions determined to make indigenous people conform to the ways of the white world.

Of course “Songs of America,” which True Concord has performed to open several of its past 20 seasons, would not be complete without a few so-called parlor songs from Stephen Foster, including the lush “Beautiful Dreamer” and “Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair.” Mexican composer Maria Grever’s frolicking “Tipitin” had its roots in Mexico, but its success came when the American Andrews Sisters recorded it in the late 1950s, opening the door for other Americans to follow. On Saturday night, True Concord soloist Erika Burkhart made us hold our breath when she hit the highest end of her register and let that note hang there, daring us not to interrupt with applause before she exhaled.

Holton closed “Songs Of America” on a high note with a trio of spirituals, including “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hand” and a voiceless version of “Swanee River” that featured the choir poignantly humming unaccompanied.