By MARK SATOLA
CLEVELAND, Ohio — The tonal superiority of the youthful voice over its adult counterpart was demonstrated once again at Sunday night’s Severance Hall concert by the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus and the Cleveland Orchestra Youth Orchestra.
On the program: works by Debussy and Poulenc. There was also an orchestra-alone curtain raiser by American composer Mason Bates.
The first inkling of vocal freshness came at that felicitous moment in the third of Debussy’s Nocturnes for orchestra, “Sirens,” when unaccompanied women’s voices suddenly blossom out of the sonorous musical web that Debussy weaves in the opening bars.
COYO music director Brett Mitchell had the happy notion to place the singers not on risers behind the orchestra but right in the midst of the players, which made for a rich blend of vocal and instrumental textures. Those who know Debussy’s magical score could not have been but impressed by this magical effect, and the lightness and luster of these young voices, so ably rehearsed by COYC director Lisa Wong, was unforgettable.
The other movements of Debussy’s triptych, “Clouds” and “Festivals,” were given excellent performances by the COYO players, with muted coloristic effects to the fore in the former, and a flashes of light and movement in the latter. The distant trumpet fanfares in “Festivals” were especially nice.
The evening opened with a recent work by Richmond-born Mason Bates, whose “Sea-Blue Circuitry” is an essay in the sort of post-minimalist tonality that is well known through the music of John Adams and Michael Torke.
Bates describes his work as a three-movement tone-poem, and appends to it a note evoking the early days of Silicon Valley and, in the slower middle section, the oceanographic phenomenon of marine snow (the sifting downward of dead organisms’ detritus).
Whether the music succeeded in conjuring these grandiloquent concepts is a question for another time, but the COYO players worked hard to generate the motoric rhythms and cross-orchestral continuity required by the piece, and mostly succeeded, despite the occasional rough spot.
The Cleveland Orchestra Youth Chorus returned on the second half of the program, taking their traditional place on the risers for Poulenc’s Gloria, a late masterwork from 1959 that achieves a surprisingly satisfying alliance of the composer’s sacred and profane duality.
Simultaneously devotional and unabashedly exuberant, full of the salon-type harmonies that the composer once called “adorably bad music,” the Gloria is in six movements full of challenges to both singers and instrumentalists.
For Sunday night’s performance, COYO engaged celebrated soprano Marian Vogel, whose role as lead supplicant in a collective prayer of praise requires of the soloist no great acrobatic agility but a superlative understanding of what is almost a dramatic role.
Vogel was perfect in her fulfillment of the composer’s intentions, and first-rate in her timbre, and the shaping of her melodic lines, which included some peculiar and difficult intervals.
Again, the youthful purity of the chorus was a central element in the performance’s success. That, combined with the young singers’ mature understanding of the music, made a strong case for this strange work. The orchestra, under Mitchell’s baton, was brilliant, especially in the last section, when Poulenc calls for them to underscore the chorus with a blaze of sharply dissonant color.
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