(Above: Diane Retallack and Eugene Vocal Arts inaugurate the Eugene Concert Choir’s 47th season with a performance called A Garden of Bells.)
By Randi Bjornstad
As Eugene Vocal Arts, the chamber ensemble of Eugene Concert Choir, joins other performing and visual arts groups finding their way back to public view after nearly two pandemic-infused years away, director Diane Retallack has chosen a program in which the title by itself conjures up a lovely vision of sight, a soothing of sound, and a sigh of relief.
She’s calling it A Garden of Bells.
The name comes from the featured work in the concert, by Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer, who imagined musically what it would be like to walk through a garden where the flowers not only showed their shapes and colors but rang like bells.
The music and song in A Garden of Bells will be accompanied by projected images of flowers, to augment the atmosphere.
That isn’t the only Schafer song on the program. He also wrote one called Gamelan, which uses the voices of the choir to evoke the sounds made by the Indonesian instruments.
“Many years ago, I was privileged to attend a week-long workshop with this brilliant and creative composer,” Retallack said in a news release announcing the concert, “and the fascinating effects of sound Murray drew from shapes and colors of the natural world left a deeply memorable impression.”
The flower theme of the first half of the concert continues with a performance of Five Flower Songs by British composer Benjamin Britten, as he turned his vision of various flowering plants into music and words.
The songs of the second half include more familiar titles of folk and movie music such as Fields of Gold, the Days of Wine and Roses, What a Wonderful World, and a Tahitian song, Haere Mai, used in the film, Mutiny on the Bounty. The choir also will perform The Garden of the Seraglio by Swedish composer Wilhelm Stenhammer, finishing up with The Lion Sleeps Tonight, accompanied by Nathalie Fortin on piano, drums by Don Elkington, and Nathan Waddell on bass.
Eugene Vocal Arts presents A Garden of Bells
When: 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nov. 14
Where: Soreng Theater, Hult Center for the Performing Arts, One Eugene Center (7th and Willamette St.)
Tickets: $21 to $35, students $10, available at eugeneconcertchoir.org or the Hult Center box office, 541-682-5000
Covid requirements: Presentation of vaccination documentation or negative covid test performed within 48 hours of the concert; mask wearing required (more information available at hultcenter.org)
