Holding a familiar note Polycoro choir celebrates highlights in three-concert series featuring a musical puzzle and a riff on a Dolly Parton hit By: Alan Small Posted: 11:17 AM CDT Thursday, May. 4, 2023

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Polycoro is about to take a rare look back at its nearly 10-year choral history.

The Winnipeg choir focuses on contemporary works and proudly states it has repeated less than 90 minutes of its repertoire since it formed in May 2015.

That all changes with New: School, a program that will include the group’s favourites written by composers from all over the world, some of which were Polycoro commissioned.

Polycoro has arranged a three-concert series for New: School, which will take the choir to afternoon concerts at Brandon’s St. Matthew’s Anglican Cathedral on Saturday and Carman United Church on Sunday, followed by a Monday evening performance at the Crescent Arts Centre in Winnipeg’s Osborne Village.

“We want to take a look at what we’ve done while we get ready for our next stage,” says John Wiens, Polycoro’s artistic director.

Among the works is one from Amy Brandon, a Nova Scotia composer and guitarist whom Polycoro commissioned to provide music for 2022.

“She’s written us a set of pieces, which is really fun. They’re called Enigmata, and you can guess from the title what Enigmata means,” Wiens says, adding they come from English translations of Latin poetry.

“It creates these musical puzzles, which are really cool. The text creates a picture, but if you didn’t know the title of the section, you’d be left asking yourself what the answer to this riddle is. It’s like coming into contact with a musical sphinx.”

While choral music is usually known for stirring hymns from sacred texts, one of the pieces in New: School is derived from a song written by someone country-music fans worship: Dolly Parton.

In 2021, Winnipeg composer and Polycoro member Scott Reimer adapted Parton’s Light of a Clear Blue Morning, a song that reached country music’s top 20 in 1977.

“In classical music, we walk side by side with popular culture but we don’t always get the chance to be a part of that, so this is a nice change of pace for us,” Wiens says. “It doesn’t sound like Dolly Parton; it sounds like Polycoro.”

The group released a video for the song that year, because it was unable to perform for live audiences owing to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The choir’s singers had to perform each part separately because provincial restrictions to prevent the virus’s spread kept them apart.

This weekend, however, they will sing together; the three concerts give Polycoro an opportunity to shine during a busy year for Winnipeg choral groups. The Winnipeg Philharmonic Choir and the Winnipeg Singers celebrated 100- and 50-year anniversaries this spring and Manitoba Opera also hit the big five-oh in 2023.

It’s not a simple process for any arts group to succeed for so long. Earlier this month, arts organizations from the Prairies wrote a letter to Pablo Rodriguez, the federal minister for Canadian heritage, seeking funds to support companies struggling with projected deficits.

Audiences haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels, and that jeopardizes the viability of all manner of arts groups, including small professional troupes like Polycoro.

In its early years, Polycoro would do eight rehearsals for a show, but more recently it has had to rely on its singers’ ability to learn compositions quickly, sometimes in only two to four rehearsals, partly because of performers’ availability, and partly to save money.

Wiens says because of that, he expects Polycoro will present concerts once it secures funding — whether from public or private contributors, both of which can be difficult to predict — instead of setting up a traditional season of shows and risk a shortfall.

“I see us moving more often as a project-centric organization instead of a program-centric organization,” he says. “I think our next few years are going to be lighter and more nimble while we figure out how to find the funding for projects and not programs, because form follows function.

“Polycoro has never really done things in the traditional manner.”

Alan.Small@winnipegfreepress.com

Twitter: @AlanDSmall