Knoxville Choral Society, youth pieces rich in contrast

In Romanian historian and philosopher Mircea Eliade's paradigms of the sacred and the profane, the world is divided into those things that are sacred and those things that are not.

Given that perspective, the program presented by the Knoxville Choral Society at the Knoxville Convention Center on Saturday could easily be divided into the sacred music presented by the KCS itself and the music performed by the winners of the KCS's Young Classical Musicians Competition.

The KCS performed four sections of traditional hymns, Shaker songs, spirituals and Mozart's "Mass in C Major," K317 (known as the "Coronation Mass").

Interspersed were 14-year-old keyboard winner Carolyn Ann Craig's performance of Aram Khachaturian's robust and demandingly tangled "Toccata in E-Flat Minor," Op. 24; voice winner Breyon Lattrell Ewing's performance of Roger Quilter's "Oh, Mistress Mine"; and strings winner Elizabeth Barksdale Weitnauer's performance of Sergei Prokofiev's angular and brittle "Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major," of which Elizabeth played the ethereal First Movement.

All were very well performed.

Although Quilter's "Oh, Mistress Mine" is solidly in the physical world of amorous intentions, Khachaturian's "Toccata" and especially Prokofiev's solo violin music were just as decidedly in the spiritual realm in that they require metaphysical and abstract sensibilities to grasp.

In the Choral Society's crisp and gorgeously presented first three sections, one was certainly lifted into a transcendent sphere - especially in the directness of Randall Thompson's "I Will Arise," the embracing harmonies of Robert Shaw/Alice Parker arrangement of "His Voice As the Sound" and the emphatic cadence of Phillip Dietterich's arrangement of "Ye Followers of The Lamb."

But just in case one tended to find oneself drifting too far into contemplation, the stomping and clapping of the terrifically executed presentation of Craig Courtney's "Secure," delivered with precision, were invigorating.

To follow that, somewhat ironically, with Shaw/Parker's arrangement of the spiritual "I Got Shoes" confirmed that in the human realm, whether we comprehend the separations of the sacred and the profane, we are both spiritual and physical beings.

There was also a fluid, lovely and lyrical presentation of Howard Helvey's arrangement of the spiritual "Ride On, King Jesus."

Although likely not performed at a royal coronation, Mozart's "Mass in C Major," written in 1779, which made up the second half of the concert, took one from the personal encounters of the spiritual and sacred in the music that proceeded it to the codified and formal.

Although well performed, it was, nevertheless, a kind of arm's-length view of the sacred.

Harold Duckett is a free-lance contributor to the News Sentinel.

© 2011, Knoxville News Sentinel Co.
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