Ingrid Laas
Sergei Pavlov holding a conductor's baton conducting the orchestra and choir.
Sergei Pavlov conducting the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra in a concert with the Festival Choir of Madison.
Doing anything for 50 years is a major achievement. Whether it’s a relationship, a profession, a hobby, or home ownership, reaching the half-century mark is cause for celebration.
As the Festival Choir of Madison reaches its 50th anniversary, it will celebrate with a gala concert with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, performing with the choir as they do during the winter holidays in their iconic performance of Handel’s Messiah. Titled “Journeys and Jubilations: 50th Anniversary Gala,” the concert will include a mix of choral masterworks, both traditional and contemporary. Sergei Pavlov, the choir’s artistic director, will conduct the concert, in the Mead Witter Concert Hall of the Hamel Music Center, June 3 at 7:30 p.m.
Since the Festival Choir is a volunteer community choir of about 50 auditioned singers, payment comes from the love of singing and the community it fosters. That’s why Lynn Nyhart, who has sung with the choir for the past 20 years, doesn’t mind the effort and time spent on learning the music.
“The 50th anniversary concert is filled with works that will display both Festival Choir’s stylistic versatility and its sound, beautifully complemented by the orchestral professionalism of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra,” she says. “As a singer, I have never worked harder nor been more thrilled to be a part of making great music.”
Beth Binhammer, who first joined the choir in 2005, is similarly moved. “Singing in the choir is such a joy,” she says. “The musicianship is quite high, which makes rehearsals fun because we are making music almost from the get-go rather than just woodshedding notes.” She was president of the board of directors for several years but took a hiatus after the choir went through a transitional phase and artistic directors came and went. “I experienced just a tad of burnout shepherding the organization through these transitional years,” she says. “I rejoined the choir in 2018, under the direction of Sergei Pavlov.”
Pavlov, who is also the director of choral activities at Edgewood College, has been the choir’s artistic director since 2015. Both Nyhart and Binhammer credit him for putting the choir on the cutting edge of Madison’s music scene.
“Sergei has brought a quality artistic vision and expression to his work with the choir that has resulted in being selected by Andrew Sewell [music director of the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra] and the WCO to sing with them in one of their season concerts in the spring of 2024,” says Binhammer.
“Sergei Pavlov has cultivated in the choir an unusually warm, rich sound,” adds Nyhart. “He also has what I can only call a genius for concert programming.”
In the gala concert, the audience will hear the results of the hours of practice and devotion that make the exquisite sound that is the choir’s trademark.
“The concert will feature, among other selections, two rarely performed pieces,” says Pavlov. “The Kyrie in D Minor by Mozart is a stand-alone late composition by the Viennese master, and Beethoven’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage is a magnificent work which is almost never done.”
The Kyrie is the first movement of the Roman Catholic Mass. Mozart’s Kyrie, K. 341, is believed to have been written around 1788, three years before his death at age 35. It is Mozart at his finest and simplest.
Beethoven’s Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage, op. 112, is a setting of two poems by Goethe. The music is a study in contrasts between the ethereal stillness that Beethoven creates in the calm sea and the boisterous crescendos of the journey. It was first performed in 1815 but sounds like it could have been written today. Its hushed prolonged chords and use of silence are unusual for its time.
What would a choral concert be without an opera chorus or two or three? “We have selected three famous choruses from the operas Aida, Nabucco and Il Trovatore by Giuseppe Verdi,” says Pavlov.
Before Verdi composed the music for Nabucco, his wife and two young children died, and he was under contract to write three operas. The first opera was a commercial failure, and he tried to get a release from writing the next two. The impresario refused and encouraged him to at least look at the libretto for Nabucco, which is loosely based on the Old Testament account of Nebuchadnezzar’s attacks on Jerusalem and the anguish of the Jewish people during that time. Nabucco was an overnight sensation and propelled Verdi to worldwide fame.
The choruses for Nabucco (1842), Il Trovatore (1853), and Aida (1871) show Verdi’s novel treatment of the chorus as a character that helps drive the action in an opera. Before him, choruses tended to be ear candy, light entertainment between the serious stuff.
On the contemporary side of things, Ola Gjeilo’s Dark Night of the Soul will feature the choir’s pianist Stephen Radtke. “The work is written like a short piano concerto with choir and strings,” says Pavlov. Its repetitive patterns and consonant harmonies are reminiscent of minimalism. The voices float above the instruments in delicate, sustained notes. The music is based on a poem by the Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross.
Besides making beautiful music, part of the Festival Choir’s mission is to give voice to people’s stories that aren’t being heard or valued and to address injustice. In 2019, Isthmus previewed a concert by the choir that addressed the horrors of the Flint, Michigan, water crisis and the killing of University of Wyoming student Matthew Shepard, who was targeted for being gay.
Its choices of repertoire also reflect its mission to promote diversity. “The wide variety of music we program is extraordinary,” says Pavlov. “In the past few years, we have sung in no less than 15 different languages.”
Nyhart says that the choir’s sense of community and its tireless work to produce the harmonious sound that makes for great performances play a big part in its success. “This combination has kept the choir vibrant for 50 years and promises to keep it going for the next 50.”
