There’s No Place Like Home for the Holidays
St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church
Dec. 13
For its 20th anniversary celebration, the Capital City Men’s Chorus rang in the holiday season by returning to the scene of the vocal ensemble’s very first concert.
Born of the Reagan era at the peak of the U.S. AIDS epidemic, the CCMC was founded to foster unity through performance, an antidote to the hypocrisy and fear that then dominated the national conversation.
Twenty years after 16 men first sang in St. Martin’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, the chorus’ 50 members, handsomely clad in black ties, honored their tradition before a jam-packed, animated, standing-room-only audience.
The CCMC occupies a unique place in Austin’s arts ecology. As a community organization, the ensemble covers a large spectrum of vocal talents, from the trained to the novice. Under the baton of Dr. Jeffrey Jones-Ragona, though, the CCMC tackles repertoires that would challenge any professional chorus (for example, the last Austin performance of the Agnus Dei mentioned below was Conspirare’s showcase for the 2008 World Symposium on Choral Music).
Jones-Ragona created an eclectic lineup for this offering that skewed to the solemn, nostalgic holiday spirit – with a few samples of the ensemble’s campy side thrown in for good measure.
The chorus displayed a knack for the medieval with the mysterious, well-balanced “Personent Hodie” and a gorgeous performance of Jacob Arcadelt’s “Ave Maria,” which built to a thrilling climax. The night’s second half opened with Ray Charles’ irreverent “Jingle Bells,” led by assistant director Bob Wolff. The ensemble cracked smiles throughout, while nailing the piece’s tricky rhythmic yo-yos.
A shout-out is due the first-rate chamber musicians who accompanied the chorus and had their solo moment in Corelli’s Christmas Concerto. Kudos to the artistic director for programming this piece to follow Gustav Holst’s haunting “In the Bleak Mid-Winter,” whose melody featured the identical three-note cell that frames the theme of the concerto.
Tucked in among these works was Samuel Barber’s towering Agnus Dei, otherwise known as the choral setting of the Adagio for Strings or, put simply, one heck of a tough piece for voices. Jones-Ragona was smart to take a faster pace than a standard adagio, and though there were weak sections in the inner voices throughout, the chorus’ emotion and grit prevailed. The masterwork’s aching, suspended peak was magnificent, and its hushed last tones hung in the air amidst a memorable silence. This was an impressive achievement.
Ironically, the night’s only major stumble was the song from which the evening took its title. The performance of “Home for the Holidays” was lackluster, rushed, and muddy and showed none of the passion or polish of the pieces surrounding it, suggesting a lack of preparation more than anything.
The concert concluded with a delightful duo of audience sing-alongs and a soaring, joyous “O Holy Night” that featured inspired solo performances by baritone Paul Scott and tenor John Keesling.
The CCMC, and the world around it, has certainly come a long way since 1988. As an endearing and clever addition to the program, Jones-Ragona invited CCMC’s founding artistic director, David Weigle, and its second director, Malcolm Nelson, to the stage to conduct the group. The applause that followed came not only for the performance at hand but also for the hands that led the way and those who carry the torch into the future.
This article appears in December 26 • 2008.