Houston Chamber Choir ends season with fairy tales and fun
Like so many other things these days, enchantment is in short supply. Luckily, the singers of Houston Chamber Choir have taken it upon themselves to create a little magic of their own.
The choir will conclude their 2021-22 season May 21 with “Once Upon a Time,” a concert devoted to fairy tales, true love and happy endings. And not a moment too soon, notes Robert Simpson, the choir’s founder and artistic director.
“This seemed like the perfect way to have a happy ending for what, for us, has been a really remarkable opportunity to come back to live performances, to be received by our audiences so enthusiastically, and frankly, just to send ourselves into the summer with a smile and with a sense of enjoyment of the child within us, of whatever age we happen to be,” he says.
Simpson has chosen several pieces keyed to these themes, including the song “Once Upon a Time,” from the 2004 Broadway production “Brooklyn, the Musical”; and “The Gallant Weaver,” Scottish composer James MacMillan’s setting of a poem by countryman Robert Burns. But the centerpiece is another “Once Upon a Time,” this one a recent collaboration between Matthew Guard, director of the Boston-based Skylark Vocal Ensemble; storyteller Sarah Walker; and Pennsylvania-based composer Benedict Sheehan.
The piece calls for a narrator reading “Snow White” and “The Little Mermaid,” interspersed with a variety of shorter choral works by, among others, Francis Poulenc, Ralph Vaughan Williams and Finland’s Einojuhani Rautavaara. (In Houston, due to time constraints, Simpson’s choir will only perform the “Snow White” section; KPRC-TV (Channel 2) personality Courtney Zavala will serve as narrator.)
Sheehan created the incidental music linking these disparate compositions, a task easier said than done. “As a composer, it’s a unique challenge, in the sense of having to work with material provided by others and to kind of stay in the background, so that it doesn’t overwhelm the narrative but makes the whole thing make musical and dramatic sense,” he says.
“It’s kind of like a film score,” Sheehan adds. “I think the end result is a thing that really hasn’t ever been done before in quite that way.”
Fairy tales are, of course, far more than simple children’s stories; they modeled proper and improper moral behavior for centuries before Walt Disney came along. “Each fairy tale is a magic mirror, which reflects some aspects of our inner world and of the steps required by our evolution from immaturity to maturity,” Austrian child psychologist and author Bruno Bettleheim wrote in his groundbreaking 1975 book “The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.”
Of “Snow White” — published by the Brothers Grimm in 1812 but much older than that — Bettleheim wrote: “The story deals essentially with the oedipal conflicts between mother and daughter; with childhood; and finally with adolescence, placing a major emphasis on what constitutes a good childhood and what is needed to grow out of it.”
More Information
Houston Chamber Choir: 'Once Upon a Time'
When: 7:30 p.m. May 21
Where: South Main Baptist Church, 4100 Main
Details: $25; 713-224-5566; houstonchamberchoir.org
Composers have long turned to fairy tales for inspiration; think Schubert’s “Der Erlkönig,” Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty,” or Englebert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel.” Despite their sometimes gruesome nature, something in these stories — their usually clear resolutions, perhaps? — strikes a deeply comforting chord.
“I think they have a way of taking you into another plane of existence, into a parallel universe, where you’re not going to be told the way things are, and so you don’t perceive it as a threat,” Sheehan says. “You don’t perceive yourself as being told what to do or what to believe, but you’re invited to step outside yourself and imagine what could be.”
Listening to music creates many of the same conditions, he argues — “a certain kind of an openness to things that are beyond sensory experience and beyond the everyday, beyond the mundane.”
“You’re invited into some kind of a transcendent realm,” Sheehan continues. “I think fairy tales do that in one way, and music does it in another way, and then you put them together and you have something really compelling and really profound.”
This is all very interesting, to be sure, but what does it mean in terms of Saturday’s concert?
“There is an unmistakable need for the human spirit to be challenged and inspired and nurtured by these stories of things beyond our common experience,” says Simpson. “For me, it’s a wonderful way to just stay childlike and to be fascinated with all that’s happening, (and) despite other things that are happening around us, to know that there is still magic in the world.”
Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.