SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Patrick Stoyanovich, St. Cecilia Cantata:   Elizabeth Stoyanovich, cond., Yali Lee Cheng and Lisa Pontén, sopranos, Kathryn Weld, alto, St. Cecilia Women’s Choir, St. James Cathedral Jubilate!, Lyrica Women’s Choir, Orchestra of St. Cecilia, St. Cecilia Church, Bainbridge Island, WA, 11.11.2007 (BJ)

New music need not always traverse new frontiers to be worth while. Commissioned for his parish’s Saint Cecilia Festival and dedicated to its priest, the Reverend Emmett Carroll, Patrick Stoyanovich’s Saint Cecilia Cantata is characteristic of the composer’s work in its thoroughly unintimidating and approachable tonal idiom. Not far removed from, say, Benjamin Britten’s, it possesses the invaluable ability to draw fresh beauties from familiar harmonic and melodic sources. Such music is characteristic also of a reaction, gathering strength in recent years, against the idea that art must be painful if it is to have any significance.

The Saint Cecilia Cantata imposes no pain and gave me a good deal of pleasure. As it now stands, it is about 32 minutes long and is laid out in four movements–I understand there is additional material that may later be added to flesh out the structure further. The text of the first movement is Stoyanovich’s own; the other three are settings of a modern English translation by L.D. Benson of the Second Nun’s Tale from Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Though this was a musical celebration, the cantata concerns itself in essence only with the saint’s martyrdom and with divine immanence.

From the viewpoint of my personal prejudice, the undertaking is not one foreordained for unalloyed enjoyment. To a non-Christian, Cecilia’s obsession with chastity is not merely quixotic but downright rebarbative. Saint Paul said “It is better to marry than to burn” (I Corinthians vii.9–as you see, the agnostic, like the devil, can cite Scripture for his purpose), but Cecilia, going Paul one better, insisted on doing both–and not only that, but on imposing the task without forewarning on her unfortunate young husband.

As a devout Roman Catholic, Stoyanovich is able to treat his story in an uplifting rather than mournful manner, and my other problem with his piece is that I find 32 minutes of almost unrelieved ecstasy a trifle hard to take. Nevertheless, the man’s sheer musicality has produced a work of often intense beauty, imbued with a conviction and cohesiveness of inspiration that carried me with it all the way. Some of the orchestral writing is perhaps a shade too thick to allow the text to emerge with complete clarity. This textural saturation is itself the corollary of Stoyanovich’s taste for sensuous richness of harmony, but he may want, with the experience of the premiere behind him, to do a little judicious thinning-out of the orchestral figurations here and there.

For the performance itself I have nothing but praise. Yali Lee Cheng, who had by far the largest assignment of the three excellent soloists, has a fine voice and used it with skill and taste. Three combined women’s choirs, totaling about 50 voices, had clearly been meticulously prepared by their directors, Janie Walton, Stacey Sunde, and LeeAnne Campos. And with only two rehearsals at her disposal Elizabeth Stoyanovich, the composer’s wife, somehow managed (as she regularly does with her amateur Bremerton Symphony) to draw from an ad hoc ensemble of 27 locally based professional musicians an orchestral contribution almost as polished as it was eloquent.

Bernard Jacobson

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