What do people think about when they're listening to music sung in a foreign language? For example, Luigi Cherubini's Requiem in C Minor, sung, as most requiems are, in Latin.
If they were in the small but enthusiastic audience at the Arkansas Choral Society's spring concert at Christ the King Catholic Church in west Little Rock on Friday night, some of them were probably thinking how proud they were to see their children up there in tuxedos and black gowns, as the choir was augmented -- actually, outnumbered -- by the University of Arkansas-Monticello Concert Choir.
With a requiem, there's a lot to think about. In the Roman Catholic Church, it's a Mass sung for the repose of the dead, and much of the text is in the form of prayer, which is hard to forget when it happens to be performed in a Catholic church, with a life-sized crucified Jesus hanging from the ceiling above the woodwind players.
There's also back story. This requiem, written in 1815, was commissioned to be played at a ceremony commemorating the anniversary of Louis XVI's beheading.
(Thus the first selection after intermission, George Frideric Handel's "Zadok the Priest" coronation anthem, was an interesting juxtaposition, with its emphatic cries of "Long live the king!" The anthem has been performed for every British coronation since its 1727 premiere.)
For anyone touched by a recent death, the beauty and solemnity of this particular requiem (which Ludwig van Beethoven so admired that it was sung at his memorial) eventually go beyond words, building and washing over them and receding, like a wave; like the wave that eventually will take us all. But not tonight.
The evening finished with a trio of rousing anthems: the Handel; "The Heavens Are Telling" from The Creation by Franz Josef Haydn; and "Hallelujah" from Christ on the Mount of Olives by Beethoven.
The Arkansas Choral Society takes anyone who wants to sing serious choral music; no auditions are required.
Metro on 04/25/2015