Youths' moving show a feast for ears and eyes

July 5, 2004

By Sherri Buri McDonald of The Register-Guard.

Rehearsing for tonight’s concert, the Oregon Bach Festival Youth Choral Academy filled a practice hall not only with sound, but with movement, too.

“I was not born to belong to a single village. My homeland is the world,” proclaimed a female soloist in “Mi Patria es el mundo,” an a cappella piece by Alberto Grau.

The 87-voice choir echoed her, singing in Spanish: “Mi Patria es el mundo,” as they clapped, thumped their chests, and shimmied their shoulders.

Their singing crescendoed and their movements built in intensity as the singers hoisted their arms. The rich, full sound of their collective voices hung in the air. Then silence.

“Good!” exclaimed conductor Maria Guinand of Venezuela.

The petite woman dressed all in black, her silver hair in a ponytail, turned to Grau, her husband, and said: “Well, they have worked hard.”

Turning back to the choir, she said: “You may sit down. Very good.”

In something of a cultural exchange, Guinand is getting a dose of the enthusiasm of North American high-schoolers, and the teenagers are getting a taste of South American music and culture from Guinand.

“It’s a wonderful group,” said Guinand, breaking a sweat after rehearsing her husband’s work, which exercises the body as well as the voice.

“You can mold it. It’s like clay. I feel like I’m making a work of art,” said Guinand, who is professor of conducting at the Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela.

The choir will perform Grau’s piece, and several others by South American composers, under Guinand’s direction at tonight’s concert in the Hult Center.

The group also will sing a Bach motet, conducted by Helmuth Rilling, the festival’s artistic director, and works by Mozart and others, conducted by the choir’s founder and regular conductor, Anton Armstrong. Armstrong is a music professor at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minn.

Now in its seventh year, the Youth Choral Academy attracts students from throughout Oregon and as far away as Alaska, Illinois and North Carolina. This summer, about a dozen of its 87 members hail from the Eugene-Springfield area.

The academy is an intense 11-day program filled with six hours of rehearsal a day and classes in musicianship, movement and vocal technique. The students live and dine in Barnhart Hall on the University of Oregon campus.

“It kind of gets to you,” said CharliRae McConnell.