Festival a true delight

"LA LUCE DELLE TACITE STELLE," MADELEINE FESTIVAL OF THE ARTS AND HUMANITIES, Cathedral of the Madeleine, Sunday.

The Madeleine Festival of the Arts and Humanities opened its annual spring series Sunday with an intriguing program that fully lived up to the festival's intentions of presenting a wide range of music.

Sunday's concert also spotlighted the talent found at the University of Utah's school of music. Both the University Harp Ensemble and the University Singers performed.

Not often do concertgoers have the opportunity of hearing something for chorus with harp accompaniment, let alone an entire evening's worth of such music. But that was exactly what awaited the audience Sunday. With effective transcriptions, splendid playing by the harpists (who were joined by the ensemble's director ShruDeLi Ownbey), resplendent singing by the choir and inspired direction by conductor Brady Allred, the evening proved to be musically rewarding and eminently entertaining.

The focal point of the concert was actually the final work on the program, Valeri Kikta's short but luminescent oratorio "La Luce Delle Tacite Stelle" ("The Light of the Silent Stars"). The work, scored for chorus and several harps (played Sunday by 12 harpists), is wonderfully descriptive, vivid, intense, effusive and singularly expressive.

Kikta skillfully managed to write a tautly constructed work whose music is evocative and ethereal, mysterious and magical — within a predominantly tonal, though modern, idiom.

Joining the harpists, who played compellingly, and the choir, which sang with passion and dramatic tension, were soloists Alisa Thomason, soprano, and Tyler Nelson, tenor. Both were exceptional, complementing the choir and bringing operatic flair to their singing.

Preceding the Kikta were three striking works that prepared the audience for what was to follow in the oratorio.

The second half of the program contained two powerful choral pieces, separated by Bernard Andres' "La Ragazza," played by members of the harp ensemble.

This section opened with Nancy Wertsch's "Antiphon for God the Father," a poignant work that exploits wonderfully the antiphonal possibilities of a church. And immediately preceding Kikta's oratorio, the choir sang Eric Whitacre's stunningly colorful and vibrant "Cloudburst."

The first half of the concert was no less outstanding. In seamlessly fluid motions, music for the choir alternated with pieces for the harp, with everything flowing naturally and effortlessly. The music for this section, with its richly textured choral pieces and rhythmically charged Latin American music transcribed for harp, was more stylistically diverse than in the second half.

The choir gave beautifully colored readings of Stephen Sametz's "I Have Had Singing," K. Lee Scott's "Pleasure Enough" and David Dickau's "If Music Be the Food of Love."

And the harpists played vibrantly on such pieces as the "Siciliana" from Ottorino Respighi's "Ancient Airs and Dances" and Ernesto Lecuona's "Malaguena."

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E-mail: ereichel@desnews.com