Vancouver Chamber Choir travels from the Bard to South African poetry in Sonnets by the Sea
A world premiere from Johannesburg-based composer Thuthuka Sibisi is on the program, with Christopher Gaze as master of ceremonies
Kari Turunen. Photo by Diamond’s Edge Photography
Thuthuka Sibisi.
The Vancouver Chamber Choir presents Sonnets by the Sea at the Granville Island Stage on June 6 at 7:30 pm
OUR FAIR CITY already has Bard on the Beach, and now, thanks to the Vancouver Chamber Choir, it’s getting Sonnets by the Sea.
Not that VCC is trying to compete with Bard—a local institution since 1990 and one of Vancouver’s most popular annual cultural events. Bard on the Beach founder Christopher Gaze is fully on-board with Sonnets by the Sea. In fact, Gaze will be treading the boards as the concert’s master of ceremonies.
As VCC conductor and artistic director Kari Turunen explains, Gaze’s role is not just to introduce the musical pieces, but to inject his own brand of levity into the proceedings.
“There’s something of the court jester in it,” Turunen says. “Choral concerts are very often pretty serious events. People can actually laugh in this one—and for the right reasons.”
The program largely comprises the words of William Shakespeare (and Elizabeth Barrett Browning) set to music by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Turunen’s fellow Finn Ulf Långbacka, and VCC composer-in-residence Laura Hawley.
In spite of its title, however, the concert will not be limited to the sonnet form. “There’s bits and pieces from several different plays,” Turunen says. “As you know, the plays have a lot of songs within them, which sort of imply that they should be sung. For example, there’s at least five songs from The Tempest—Ariel’s songs. Mainly the texts are like this, they’re already intended to be sung within the play.”
Shakespeare aside, Sonnets by the Sea will also include the world premiere of An Undying Light, Johannesburg-based composer Thuthuka Sibisi’s musical setting of a poem by his fellow South African Kopano Maroga.
Turunen met Sibisi when the latter was in Vancouver with Broken Chord, the composer’s collaboration with dancer-choreographer Gregory Maqoma. A 2023 run of Broken Chord at the Playhouse featured the Vancouver Chamber Choir in a performance that Stir called “powerful social commentary and heartfelt expression of the meaning of home, as gutting as it is glorious”.
“We really liked that production, and we spoke with Thuthuka right after: ‘Would you be willing to write something for us?’” recalls Turunen. “And this is the result. There’s a little bit of musical theatre to it. It’s quite emotional, which I think is really lovely. It’s full, it’s written for eight voices and so on, but it’s not cerebral at all. I’d say it’s more accessible, which I’d say fits in with the other works in that sense.”
In an email to Stir, Sibisi reveals that his initial inspiration for the score was otherworldly, rooted in the spirituality of traditional Zulu cosmology, but he felt himself pulled in a very different direction.
“The music seemed to write itself toward a type of insistence, a feeling of angst with evolving and urgent recurrence,” the composer writes. “Kopano and I had met a little while before this, by chance really, but we connected immediately. I brought up some of these feelings with them and asked if anything came up for them. We parsed through some of their work, but it was the poem they had written for their friend Wilton that stuck with me. I’d like to think we (Kopano and I) found each other and in a way the music found this poem too.”
The poem, which is both heartbreaking and deeply hopeful, describes a yearning to communicate one’s love to cherished others—those who have crossed the great divide between life and death and those who remain on this side of that line.
As Sibisi explains it, “Although the grief of Kopano’s poetry speaks to a specific type of dying, what is also exquisitely foreshadowed is an interplay of the varying gestures of living—of having lived heart to heart in the palms of another. The going and coming back of the melodic arch resembles the ebb and flow of coming into life, being in the living, and leaving life to begin anew (again) coming into life (again).”
Sibisi reveals that Kopano wrote the piece for a friend who was then grappling with suicidal ideation but ultimately chose life. The piece took on a deeper resonance, however, when a mutual friend of the poet and the composer made the opposite choice.
“I don’t know what to name this feeling but there was something about how things came to be to meet at the very moment that they did—me writing and thinking through recursive angst and the ending of things, meeting Kopano and their words trying to hold the light of their friend, and then our friend suddenly passing—that feels to be an extension of the poem too,” Sibisi writes. “That we are all always in a moment of both holding on to or letting go of something, someone, someplace. Bearing witness to each other and hoping we too are seen enough to be held on to.”
Turunen acknowledges that, on paper, Sibisi’s piece seems like an odd fit for such a crowd-pleasing program, but he has full confidence that the audience will be up for the challenge of riding out the emotional dynamics, with a little help from a master thespian.
“It’s not related to Shakespeare in any way, but it actually ended up, I feel, being a pretty Shakespearean shift,” he says of An Undying Light. “There’s actually quite a lot of levity to these pieces—you know, they’re quite blithe and so on—and then this Sibisi piece is really heavy. It’s about death. But I think that’s quite Shakespearean, the flipping of the emotion very quickly, and then we have Christopher to aid in the changes of mood.”
For his part, Sibisi says that he is curious about how his work will speak to listeners who might be more familiar with 17th- and 19th-century sonnets.
“I am keen to hear/see how the audience finds a bridge to the music and poetry; how the audience finds ways of seeing themselves through the music,” he writes. “Part of my practice is thinking through acts of witnessing, and the double action of ‘seeing’—how to see into someone and how to be wholly seen. There are passageways that language can facilitate for this form of witnessing. There’s something extraordinary in how the ephemeral, the sonic, can pierce through the material condition to open up to, and into, which thoroughly enchants me.
“I don’t know if this speaks to the relationship between my work and the rest of the program, but I am intrigued by what its distinction from Shakespeare (and/or Barrett Browning) may trigger for the audience,” the composer concludes. “If there’s a hope, it is that it creates a deeper, more capacious, more nuanced awakening of what poetry and music can offer in collapsing our assumptions of time, place, and people.” 
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