Choralis

Washington Post; Monday, June 30, 2008; C03

Haydn's oratorio "Die Schoepfung" ("The Creation") opens on a scene of quiet, dark orchestral chaos (quite lovely, somewhat chromatic chaos, to be sure) and then proceeds happily through God's busy days of creating: light, the firmament and the waters, plants and animals and, finally, man (remember, Haydn's was an age of optimism) -- proclaiming after each that "it was good."

The cheerful performance of the oratorio that Choralis brought to Alexandria's Schlesinger Concert Hall on Friday left one with this same feeling of satisfaction. The chorus, about 90 strong and augmented with 35 high school members of the Choralis Summer Choral Festival, sang crisply, with splendid diction and impressive presence at both ends of the dynamic spectrum. Attacks were alert and contrapuntal textures were clean and balanced. The well-prepared orchestra was as charming in its roles as eagles and larks as it was as whales and worms.

The soloists approached their assignments with a sense of the dramatic. Bass Kerry Wilkerson, who was responsible for much of the narration, sang powerfully throughout his range. Tenor Joseph Dietrich projected excellent diction and a wonderfully clean sound up high but couldn't be heard much in some of the lower range, and soprano Susan Wheeler, who did a fine job with coloratura passages, swallowed most of her texts.

There was a lot of fussing with "dramatic" lighting and projections of translations superimposed on illustrations of what was being created -- water, cows, people and so forth. Haydn didn't need this help.

Conductor Gretchen Kuhrmann, who led all this briskly and confidently, is building a fine program with this group.

-- Joan Reinthaler