A long journey is coming full circle for Toronto composer Nic Gotham with the performance at Koerner Hall of his choral setting of William Butler Yeats’ The Fool by the Roadside on Nov. 11.
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Gotham’s is but one of several pieces on a programme being presented by the Latvian Radio Choir and four Canadian university choirs under the auspices of Soundstreams’ biennial choral extravaganza.
The music covers a wide spectrum. There are four excerpts from Sergei Rachmaninov’s All-Night Vigil, Alfred Schnittke’s Choral Concerto as well as the premiere of a new piece commissioned from Montreal composer Ana Sokolovic on the programme.
If Gotham’s name rings a bell, it might be for the score of Nigredo Hotel, an opera he co-wrote with Ann-Marie MacDonald that was premiered at the Tarragon Theatre back in 1992. It has since become one of the most-produced Canadian operas.
Gotham says he loves texts and the challenges of setting them to music. When he was commissioned to write a piece for the Vancouver Chamber Choir, he found the Yeats poem to have the right inspiration. He began working on it in Toronto, but had moved to the Latvian capital of Riga with his wife, theatre director Banuta Rubess, before its premiere in 1999.
Now, 14 years later, Gotham, Rubess and their daughter are back living in Toronto — and The Fool by the Roadside has followed Gotham back to the place where it all started.
The Latvian Radio Choir connection was established soon after the family arrived in Riga. “I noticed how important choir music was there, and I had this fresh piece in my hands,” Gotham recalls. Latvian Radio Choir director Kaspars Putnins liked the score, “and this was my entrée in music there. I worked much more with choirs after that.”
The composer says he wanted to give the choir something “reflective and philosophical,” in Fool by the Roadside. “I spend a lot of time thinking about what makes a great choral text,” says Gotham. “What do people need to give voice to? It’s a perennial question for me.”
“The text needs to bear the weight of whatever music is written on it,” Gotham adds. His atmospheric setting of Yeats’s verse is very clever. There’s a steady underlying pulse, but the voices speed up and slow down, much like a thread unwinding from a spool. The piece has a timeless quality, much like the words themselves:
When all works that have
From cradle run to grave
From grave to cradle run instead;
When thoughts that a fool
Has wound upon a spool
Are but loose thread, are but loose thread;
When cradle and spool are past
And I mere shade at last
Coagulate of stuff
Transparent like the wind,
I think that I may find
A faithful love, a faithful love.
Gotham was connected to the poem by his wife, who quoted it as a postcript to Oh Pilot, an opera they wrote together after the success of Nigredo Hotel. The composer says he wrote several different pieces of musical theatre while in Latvia, including Fruits of the Earth, a secular oratorio for the Latvian Radio Choir, and Strategy, an adaptation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War for women’s voices.
“I thought it would be fun to take a clichéd male text and have it sung by women,” chuckles Gotham of the Sun Tzu book.
Now that he and Rubess and back in Toronto, the composer says he’s actively looking for opportunities to get his work performed. He also admits that, “the wheels are definitely turning in my mind,” when it comes to opera.
He is addicted to music theatre, he admits. “I love how outrageously complex the whole thing is.”
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For all the details on the Soundstreams concert, click here.
And here’s a sample of the incredible choral artistry of the Latvian Radio Choir, joined here by piano and percussion in a remarkable setting of Lux Aeterna by contemporary Latvian composer Peteris Butans:
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
