I went to a pretty remark­able concert last night. The Yale Schola Cantorum performed Sofia Gubaiduli­na’s Sonnenge­sang: The Canticle of the Sun, a sprawl­ing setting of St. Francis of Assisi’s text for chorus, percus­sion, and cello soloist (the afore­men­tioned Hannah Collins). After reading Matt Barn­son’s excel­lent program notes during the interval, I was fairly certain I was going to hate the piece, not least of all because I’d heard it was 40 minutes long, and also about some reli­gious mumble-jumble. (“In each of my works I expe­ri­ence the Eucharist as fantasy”? Please, spare us.) Then they brought the tuned water-goblets out on stage, and I really expected the worst.

Actually, though, I should­n’t have worried, because we’re talking about Simon Carring­ton here (he’s the conduc­tor). He’s a man of taste. You should see the convert­ible he some­times drives. It was because of Simon that I got to play in Dallapic­co­la’s Canti di Prigio­nia a few years back—what a hair-raising piece.

Canticle of the Sun was also hair-raising, in a completely differ­ent, much more ecstatic sort of way. The cellists has to act as a sort of protag­o­nist figure, a wanderer in search of some sort of reli­gious salvation—which I under­stand was achieved, to judge by the awesome F‑sharp major closing minutes. Over the course of the piece, Hannah had to de-tune her C string down to A flat, then back up again, get up and play a gong, super­ball a bass drum (and let me just say, she super-balled it), and go bow a flex­a­tone in the chorus’s face. There’s a really thin line here between drama and cheesi­ness (the bad kind, not the Alex kind)—but I was not, at any point, embar­rassed for the sake of anyone onstage, so I think that means every­thing was just fine.

There were some real musical high points, too. The whole language was very fresh-sounding, espe­cially in the more static sections (at one partic­u­larly engross­ing point, the percus­sion­ists had to play their water-glasses for about five minutes straight, without pausing to re-wet their fingers. How did they do it??) I was also really intrigued by the large-scale gestures in the music—for instance, the cello’s obvi­ously symbolic and incred­i­bly protracted ascent from low A‑flat to high god-knows-what toward the end of the piece, and how the opening solo intro­duces the chorus with a jaunty glis­sando. There were, of course, some sections where my mind wandered, but then, I get distracted during Webern’s Fünf Orch­ester­stücke, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.

Simon warned all of us before­hand that there was a great deal of silence in the piece, and please not to cough, shuffle our program, call our mother, etc. and I think it made the audience slightly on edge. There was defi­nitely more coughing as a result. Also, one unfor­tu­nate choris­ter forgot to silence his ringer, and it went off, painfully, in his tuxedo pocket. I don’t think it would have been so painful if everyone weren’t paying such close atten­tion to the music, so I guess the jolt in my stomach was a good sign.