Vivaldi Chamber Choir, Highlands United Church (3255 Edgemont Blvd, North Vancouver), Saturday, Nov. 25, 7 p.m. Info at vivaldichoir.org/ceremony.php. Tickets ($25/20) at the door or online at ceremony_united.brownpapertickets.com.
Christina Rossetti probably thought she was about to die.
Her heart palpitated. Her hair fell out. Her eyes protruded.
She was suffering the most dire-sounding of medical ailments: Graves’ disease.
It was likely in that weakened state she wrote a poem originally published as “A Christmas Carol”but now solely known as “In the Bleak Midwinter.”
“… frosty wind made moan/ Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.”
She imagines her God as a being unable to be held by Heaven or sustained by Earth, reflecting what poet Tim Steele called her “troubled religious faith.”
“She found God the Father terrifying and remote but identified with the humanity and suffering of Jesus,” he writes.
Rossetti eventually recovered, focusing her poetry on her religious faith until her death in 1894.
But her Christmas poem languished. Over 22 years, she neglected to include “In the Bleak Midwinter” in a single collection.
The work might have been forgotten if not for her brother, who republished the work 10 years after Rossetti’s death. Two years later, composer Gustav Holst was moved to immortalize those words with a melody.
The piece is just one of the songs set to be sung at Highlands United Church this Saturday.
The concert is, according to conductor and director, Edette Gagné, “something completely different.”
“In the Bleak Midwinter” in particular is: “Not your traditional, happy-happy-Christmas-is-here! sort of piece,” she says with a laugh.
The concert is set to feature Rosanna Chiu on harp and Ty Koch as a soloist.
A student at the Vancouver Academy of Music, Gagnémakes Koch sound like a coupe de ville that had been hiding at the bottom of the Cracker Jack box.
“Countertenors are rare and sopranists are even more rare,” she says. “Ty sings my repertoire, in my range, and frequently easier than I can.”
Koch’s speaking voice is deep but when he sings there’s an unexpected range. It’s a bit like flipping through an atlas and finding more pages than you counted on.
“We discovered that not only had his voice changed and stabilized quite young but that he had this amazing falsetto,” Gagné says.
Having sung in the British Columbia Boys Choir, Koch was happy to pick up a sound he’d initially believed had been stolen by maturity.
“I loved singing as a boy soprano. I get to do it again,” he says.
Gagné recommended Koch immerse himself in counter-tenors like Andreas Scholl and Philippe Jaroussky.
“I’d listen to these guys and figure out what I really liked about their sound,” Koch says.
While his academic focus is opera, Koch is also a student of the blues.
“I’ll spend hours upon hours listening to old recordings,” he says, discussing learning the slide guitar via Elmore James and Duane Allman records.
Asked about the setlist for Saturday’s concert – which ranges from Anton Bruckner to Alice Parker – Gagné laughs.
“That was mostly my fault,” she says.
The show includes Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols,” which celebrates the birth of Jesus Christ and even includes a section that depicts the baby messiah as a warrior and his crib as a trench. The infant is set to “rifle Satan’s fold,” despite being “so few days old.”
While it may be unusual, it’s a “joyous piece of music to perform,” Gagné says. It’s also rife with solo opportunities, she says.
“Since the Ceremony of the Carols was originally written for boy sopranos, I thought the sound of a counter-tenor would be much more fitting for the solos,” she says.
Conductor and singer are hard at work rehearsing, with Koch scheduled to sing alongside the harpist after our interview.
“It’s very important to me when I perform that I get the proper feelings I want to convey through the music,” he says.
Gagné concurs. “I’m really hoping that people take a very unusual musical journey as a Christmas show.”
