New York Classical Review

Walt Whitman, America’s all-embracing poet, has inspired composers here and abroad with his indelible imagery, stretching lines and sprung rhythms. 

The latest to take the Whitman challenge is Wayne Oquin, the Houston native and Juilliard faculty member whose new choral work, On the Words of Walt Whitman, received its world premiere Wednesday night at St. Bartholomew’s Church.

Kent Tritle conducted the Musica Sacra chorus and orchestra (strings, piano, harp, organ and percussion), in vivid settings of 17 poems—some familiar, others less so, but all touched with the poet’s earthy emotions and love of humanity.  Soprano Susanna Phillips and baritone John Moore took solo roles in five of the movements, with the emphasis more on elucidating the text than on vocal display.

Despite the large forces involved, Whitman’s sometimes extravagant texts and the vastness of the church’s nave, there wasn’t a hint of bombast in this performance. Nuance and inner emotion were the order of the evening. You could count the fortissimos on one hand.

As if to prepare the audience to lean in and listen closely, the program opened with Caroline Shaw’s subtle masterpiece for string quartet, Entr’acte. An ensemble consisting of four section leaders of the string orchestra–violinists Jesse Mills and Emma Frucht, violist Kai Sugatski and cellist Arthur Fiacco, Jr.—conveyed the shifting colors of this piece, inspired by a late Haydn minuet, with a throb of eighth notes in the outer sections and syncopated pizzicato with a Bernstein-like tune in the middle.

Then, by way of introduction to Oquin’s choral idiom, Tritle led his singers in three a capella works that have become staples of the choral repertoire. With a clear beat and phrase-shaping gestures, he drew out the velvety, otherworldly tones of Oquin’s Ave Maria, composed in 2000.

The 2013 work O Magnum Mysterium showed more harmonic richness, as chant-like soprano lines floated free of the gorgeous stacked chords, and octave doublings highlighted other melodies. Alleluia, composed in 2018, leavened its song of praise with very human hopes and fears, expressed through unresolved dissonances and high-wire entrances for the sopranos, beautifully executed; near the end, the sopranos again climbed high while the rest of the chorus surged underneath like sea swells.

Sea imagery appeared often in the Whitman settings of Oquin’s new work, beginning with the second movement, “The Ship Starting,” with its room-shaking low organ note signifying the ocean’s depth as no other musical sound can. Organist Alexander Pattavina used more deep pedal notes to evoke a similar scene in “A Word Out of the Sea” and nocturnal moods in “Twilight” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.”

The “rhythm section,” if you will, of percussionists Jeffrey Irving and Joseph Tompkins, pianist Peggy Kampmeier and harpist Bridget Kibbey brought their distinctive colors to many of the settings, with gliding marimba accents in “Song of Myself,” a sparkle of bells highlighting fervent strings in “I hear America Singing,” an explosive bass drum rattling the chimes in “The Sobbing of the Bells,” and a fine kitchen-sink racket in two-plus-three rhythm in “Proud Music of the Storm.”

The sound of Kibbey’s harp in particular seemed to bloom in the big space, rising almost to obbligato status with characterful phrases and figures in most of the work’s movements.

That space also ate up vocal diction, so a listener had to be content with the beautifully melded and tuned choral sound while following the words in the printed program. In the non-showy solo parts, soprano Phillips delivered her texts in clear, ivory tones that were allowed to soar briefly and blend prettily with harp and strings in “The Last Invocation,” while Moore intoned with a frank, forward baritone in “A Word Out of the Sea” and “When Lilacs…”

After acknowledging the audience’s applause for his new work, composer Oquin introduced the encore: another new piece, composed at the suggestion of Susanna Phillips, Sure on This Shining Night for chorus with violin and piano. Like Whitman’s verses, the tender poem by James Agee has been catnip for composers, notably Samuel Barber and Morten Lauridsen. In a delicate rendition by the choir with pianist Kampmeier and violinist Mills, Oquin’s version proved a worthy addition to this lineage.