Santore, Jonathan - There Are Many Other Legends - New Hampshire Master Chorale
Both the New Hampshire Master Chorale and the Manchester Choral Society elevate the works of composer-in-residence Jonathan Santore on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS, an expansive collection of works from Santore’s choral catalog. Each piece highlights the composer’s impressive command of choral writing and the ensemble’s traditions. Through their texts and other premises, several works on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS are referential pieces, some alluding to other works of vocal music while others recall the mythology of distant cultures. Requiem: Learning to Fall, a work which is both internally and externally referential, yielding a compelling, multi-layered musical text. The composition demonstrates Santore’s command of vocal texture and ability to add character to the choir’s text through instrumental accompaniments. At the heart of Requiem is the cyclical recurrence of multiple musical and textual ideas, including the ancient “dies irae” Gregorian Chant and various musical cues of Santore’s creation. The most important of these is his setting of the word “alleluia,” which opens the work and returns multiple times as a positive counterbalance to the darker, more dissonant instrumental representations of the “dies irae” chant. Requiem and Forgetting are the album’s only two pieces containing orchestral arrangements, featuring the New Hampshire-based Manchester Choral Society and Orchestra. However, several of the pieces on THERE ARE MANY OTHER LEGENDS are written for both choir and additional instrumentation, including strings, piano, and soprano saxophone. While choral music is the focus of this album, Santore’s instrumental writing and orchestration for heterogeneous ensembles should not be overlooked. For example, Santore’s three-movement work O Sweet Spontaneous Earth evocatively pits the choir against a string trio as it conveys its transformative musical and textual form. In this way, O Sweet Spontaneous Earth stands alongside Requiem as the album’s most structurally nuanced and narratively cogent works. HIGHLIGHTS Jonathan Santore teaches Music Theory and Composition at Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, where he previously served as chair of the Department of Music, Theatre, and Dance. Santore has received numerous awards, including The American Prize in 2013, two New Hampshire Composer of the Year awards and an Individual Artist Fellowship from the New Hampshire State Council of the Arts, being one of only six recipients from an applicant pool of 90 professional artists. Founded in 2003 by conductor Dan Perkins, the New Hampshire Master Chorale is a non-profit choir comprised of New England singers with international performance experience. The chamber ensemble commissions and premieres works by New Hampshire composers. Perkins is also Music Director of the Manchester Choral Society, a non-profit choir established in 1961 which he describes as a “magnet for serious singers” New Hampshire Magazine awarded the Master Chorale with its “Best in NH 2008 – Musical History Program” award, citing Santore’s setting of “texts from New Hampshire [history] to compose music, creating a unique blend of Granite State history, music and art.”