"With the addition of the 'Chorus Mysticus' text", Shulstad writes, "the Gretchen theme has been transformed and she no longer appears as a masked Faust.
The original sub-heading referred to the Lucerne Festival Chorus, and the text referred to the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra.
To better effect, she parried the angelic cheer of the American Boychoir and women of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus in the text from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn".
When the chorus sings a text based on Oval Office diary entries ("7 a.m. Awake and up. 7 05 a.m. Breakfast. At 7 15 did exercises")., the music is "strongly pulsed," he said, with Minimalist tendencies.
But in the most intricately layered section of "Requiem Canticles" — the section in which vocal soloists chant the Libera Me while the rest of the chorus mutters the text at greater speed — the murkiness evoked the chaos of Judgment Day.
Typical too of the Copland style are two major works that were written in time of war Lincoln Portrait (1942), for speaker and chorus, on a text drawn from Lincoln's speeches, and Letter from Home (1944), as well as the melodious Third Symphony (1946).
A hymn or chorus, a Bible text, a random statement from the pulpit -- any or all of those things can lead my thoughts down a path that takes me to a dark place where sorrow is overwhelming.
The instruments are few, but four soloists and chorus pass portions of text from one to another.
And in "Nonviolence," when the chorus quotes a Hindu text calling for kindness and renunciation, the music has a slashing, relentless power.
The program offered Busoni's visionary 1904 Piano Concerto in C, a gargantuan work of more than 70 minutes with a mystical finale that includes a male chorus singing a German text in praise of Allah.
