Review: Eugene Concert Choir’s concert about losing loved ones to dementia “grabbed hold of the audience’s heart and soul from the start and never let go”

Review: Eugene Concert Choir’s concert about losing loved ones to dementia “grabbed hold of the audience’s heart and soul from the start and never let go”

By Daniel Buckwalter

Somehow, I thought nearly a decade removed from the inferno would be enough time.
Enough time to absorb, digest and make spiritual peace with what I couldn’t control up to that fateful Saturday on Labor Day weekend in 2015 — the madness of Dad slipping away mentally and emotionally by the day, first in small steps, then in frightening leaps, until he became the disease, and the child, and not the reserved, dignified old-world man who was all at once imposing, distant, admirable, kind, loving, full of dignity and a font of wisdom.

I thought enough time had passed to look at things dispassionately. I was wrong.

Dad died of complications from Lewey body dementia. He was 87, and the last seven or eight years of his life are something I still haven’t fully wrapped my mind around — his anger, his sadness and his despair at this final road he had to travel, as well as my anger, my sadness and my despair at having to watch him take that final road.

It was unfair to a man driven by work and his love of opera (he sang in church choirs and concert chorales), it was unfair to his wife and yes, to me and the other kids. It was a fool’s errand for me to believe that almost a decade removed from the inferno would be enough time to make spiritual peace with it all.

It still hurts.

I am not alone. Eugene Vocal Arts and Orchestra, under the direction of Diane Retallack, took patrons on a walk through the singularly dreadful disease that is Alzheimer’s and dementia and the families who can only watch helplessly in silent horror.

Shadow and Light: An Alzheimer’s Journey was performed on April 12 and 13 in the Soreng Theater at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts, and the hour-plus concert grabbed hold of the audience’s heart and soul from the start and never let go.

Composer Joan Szymko wrote Shadow and Light; an Alzheimer’s Journey specifically for the Eugene Concert Choir and first performed in 2016.

Retallack first conducted this heart-wrenching piece with Eugene Vocal Arts and Orchestra in 2016, and in this, the Eugene Concert Choir’s Golden Anniversary Season, she made damn sure to reprise it. Shadow and Light — written specifically for Eugene Concert Choir by Joan Szymko, a well-known Portland-based composer and choral director — is one of the signature pieces Retallack has conducted in her 40 years as artistic director.

It is not a complicated piece musically. Neither the chorus or the soloists — soprano Arwen Myers, mezzo-soprano Ágnes Vojtkó and tenor Brendan Thuohy — were overly taxed. Instead, it is the message of love, fear and frustration that resonates in the 16 vignettes and carries the listener on the Alzheimer’s and dementia journey that they either will never forget or, like me, can’t forget.

From the opening vignette (I Felt a Cleaving, with Emily Dickinson poetry) to the very last vignette (Love Bears All Things, with words from 1 Corinthians), Szymko captures everything insidious about a disease that the Alzheimer’s Association in 2024 reported 6.9 million Americans suffer from, and that one in nine people 65 and older are inflicted with it.

I remembered everything as the concert unfolded: I remembered hearing about the time a Roseburg police officer had to gently coax Dad out of his car because he was lost, in Roseburg, where he lived for 45 years; I remembered Dad losing his car keys for good after a near accident; I remembered helping Dad cut his food during dinner when I visited on weekends; I remembered his wife telling me that Dad had turned uncharacteristically violent for a short spell; I remembered Dad speaking fondly of his native South Carolina, which he left when he was 20 and maybe visited a half-dozen times in my lifetime; and I remembered the vinyl spiritual records Dad’s wife told me she played for him at the end.

Other patrons remembered their own stories. One man noted after Sunday’s performance that his mother had Alzheimer’s. He shook his head and muttered to his wife in a loud enough whisper for others to hear that “Next time, we’re seeing Shrek.” His wife smiled. So did others. A woman patted him on the arm. It was heavy.

Shadow and Light: An Alzheimer’s Journey is an amazing experience that can’t be reprised often, of course, but I am grateful again that music can play a role in healing and understanding all the things I can’t control.