Above: performance photo by Alan Barnett
Author: Shoshana Klein
Saturday November 18th, 2023 - The New York Choral Society gave a concert on Saturday afternoon at the Gerald Lynch Theater, joined by the new-music focused Bergamot Quartet and composer/conductor/vocalist Raquel Acevedo Klein. The premise had to do with Hildegard von Bingen, and most of the repertoire was arrangements of her music for choir.
I love a continuous performance, but for this one, I never really had in idea of where we were in the program, even though there was supposedly a multi-movement work sharing the title of the concert in the middle - at some points it was clear that the choir was singing in English and I suppose that was the giveaway, but the setup and video never really changed, so it was a little hard to tell.
The concert began with Raquel Acevedo Klein only, singing with some electronic manipulations, as everyone else gathered on stage. It was a sizeable group, so it was effective to have something going on instead of just having the audience watch while people found their spots onstage.
The electronic element was interesting: Ms. Acevedo Klein (above, photo by Alan Barnett) is able to make some very cool things happen. She and the quartet mostly acted as sort of interludes between the choral pieces, sometimes with some overlap. It was a nice juxtaposition to have the older and newer, but didn’t feel like it had a lot of direction.
The video element was somewhat engaging as well, with one big screen behind the ensemble and two smaller ones flanking the stage. There were busy animations happening throughout the production, definitely tied to the music but only in instrumentation - usually when the quartet only was playing, the visuals would be sparser, one specific animation that recurred and tied things together a bit. When the whole choir was active, there would be many visuals that would come back to create a busy landscape, sometimes involving “angel” imagery, but usually not in a typical Christian imagining (which I did kind of appreciate, but this was never really explored as far as I could tell).
The pieces were certainly not bad - I’ll definitely admit I’m not much of a choir person and surely missed plenty of nuance. Overall, the performance was interesting but repetitive, and I just didn’t have a sense of the structure, narrative, or takeaway, which - given all of the extra elements - it seemed like there was going to be.
~ Shoshana Klein