Saturday night’s concert by the Cantabile Chamber Singers, with their conductor Cheryll J. Chung, at Church of the Redeemer; entitled A Prism of Sound, was the last of their 2023/24 season and, I think, the first time I’ve seen this particular choir.  It was an all Canadian programme.  The first part consisted of works by various choral composers like Matthew Emery and Peter Togni and it was all tonal works for unaccompanied choir on, basically, liturgical texts.  It was pleasant enough but, for me at least, after a while one Ave Verum Corpus sounds much like the rest.  I surprised myself by really quite liking Emery’s Sweetest Love which was quite complex and rather overturned my previous impressions of his music.  I also enjoyed Eleanor Daley’s setting of an extract from the Song of Solomon; Upon Your Heart.  But maybe that’s because the text has special resonance for me.  No complaints about the performance though.  They are a very good choir.

The last two works on the programme were premieres.  Jacqueline Teh’s Wish was another tonal piece for unaccompanied choir with no discernable jazz influence which seemed odd given her background.  Then we came to the most substantial piece of the evening and the one I had really gone to hear; Saman Shahi’s Fragments.  For this the singers were joined by the Ton Beau Quartet and Alexandra Harvey and Kevin Chen had solo parts.

It was very different from what had come before.  There’s microtonality and other effects for the strings and the choir is required to do much more than just sing.  There’s murmuring and stomping and clapping and more.  All of this supports a three part text; drawn from interviews with displaced persons, about the refugee experience; displacement physically and psychologically.  It opens and closes with passages that evoke the liminal state between waking and sleep while the middle deals with the panic induced by flashbacks.

There’s repetition in a fugue like way of a number sequence that has a driving energy that reminded me of Andrew Staniland’s Dark Star Requiem.  The bending of tonality in the strings evoked Persian or Arabic classical string playing.  There’s a lot packed into a 20 minute piece and a lot that likely took the singers well out of their comfort zone but they did really well.  The string quartet was also quite excellent.  Bottom line, I really liked the piece and it was the highlight of my evening.

Photo credit: Drew Henderson