Threshold of Night: Music of Tarik O’Regan
St. Martin’s Lutheran Church, Sept. 28
“To see a World in a Grain of Sand,
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.”
Tarik O’Regan included these lines by William Blake in the first movement of his 2004 choral work, Triptych, and at times during the program of the composer’s music performed by Conspirare last week, you could feel what the old mystic poet meant. In something as simple as a sustained note by a single human voice or the blending of several voices, in the repetition of a phrase or the rise or fall of a melodic line, you could sense a door open to something greater, something grander, something encompassing all things.
Much of that is due to O’Regan, who may still be younger than 30 but whose grasp of choral tradition and the expressiveness of the human voice belongs to a composer twice his age. He’s able to summon up the majestic harmonies of classical works and the discomfiting dissonance of contemporary literature with equal facility, to ease us to a place of serene stillness, as in the call to slumber “Care Charminge Sleep,” or rouse us to a state of rapture, as in the third movement of Triptych, where the chorus contemplates resurrection in the hereafter in pumping, racing rhythms of ecstatic joy. Like many of the great composers, O’Regan can build to a moment of musical intensity that taps something elemental in our being, but he’ll also on occasion follow a climactic point by having a few singers or instruments hold onto a note from the climax, drawing it out and extending its impact in miniature. In that sustained, diminished tone, it seems as if the universe is holding its breath or that we’re privy to that background hum still resonating from the big bang.
In Conspirare, O’Regan was blessed to have a choral ensemble able to give voice to his compositions in all their colors and complexity. Conducted expertly – as always – by Artistic Director Craig Hella Johnson, Austin’s celebrated company of voices mined the powerful feelings deep within the music and released it to the air with striking force. In “Had I Not Seen the Sun,” inspired by Emily Dickinson’s poem (and commissioned by Conspirare), the singers’ vigorous repetition of the word “wilderness” conjured visions of a thicket in thorny profusion. In “Threshold of Night,” the men’s call to “Go back, my babe,” repeated insistently to a child seeking shelter, added poignance to the images of a storm-ravaged landscape, so evocative of Katrina’s aftermath. And threaded throughout Triptych, the lone voice of Nina Revering, pure and clear to an almost otherworldly degree, carved out moments of preternatural beauty and calm, as in the eye of a passing hurricane. Some choirs singing about the angelic voices of heaven would be setting themselves up for a fall, but not Conspirare. Singing “The Ecstasies Above,” based on the poem “Israfel” by Edgar Allan Poe, the ensemble swept us up into the firmament to hear the glories of “the starry choir.” Throughout the evening, composer and chorus seemed exquisitely matched and left us hoping for more O’Regan in Conspirare’s future. Listening to the ensemble sing his rich and splendid music, we held Infinity in the curl of our ears and Eternity in a song.
This article appears in October 5 • 2007.