Present Music Gives Thanks

A whiff of incense clung to the air from the Sunday mass held earlier that day. Present Music’s annual Thanksgiving concert at the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist (Nov. 21) was conceived as a spiritual event in the broadest, most inclusive sense, and the scent of divine yearning helped set the stage for Present Music’s harmonious arrangement of many traditions.

The concert was bracketed by performances by the Bucks Native American Singing and Drumming Group, whose pounding drumbeats and rhythmic chanting grounded the event in the indigenous customs of the upper Midwest. Karen Armstrong’s performance on the mighty pipe organ of Jeanne Demessieux’s “Repons pour le Temps de Paques” echoed like the Phantom of the Opera through the cathedral’s marbled heights. PM artistic director and conductor Kein Stalheim coaxed unconventional beauty from his small string orchestra on John Adams’ “Shaker Loops,” its title an allusion to the pietistic New England sect whose members sought to transcend the physical in the ecstasy of dance.

Alternate vehicles of transcendence were also heard on the program. In John Taverner’s “Come and do Your Will in Me,” a composition steeped in the Eastern Orthodox belief in spiritual elevation through music suggesting a suspension of space and time, the hallowed ascent of the choral voices pulled against the lower registers of a Byzantine mode. The Jewish liturgical tradition was represented by the work of Srul Iriving Glick, whose “Psalm 47: featured soaring voices and a lovely yet modern melody.

At the concert’s climax, performers from Present Music, the Milwaukee Children’s Choir, the Milwaukee Choral Artists and audience members alike joined in a circle dance around the cathedral’s interior to the drumming of the Bucks Group.