Choruses Come to Kendal

Choral singing is one of the great joys of life. The sound of a choir is moving precisely because it can reflect the full range of human experience; and when the piece being performed is well-conceived, it achieves its effect by capturing the proper balance of the emotional freight of the lyrics: reverence perhaps, or joy, or excitement, or weariness, or love, or tenderness, or even rage. And that's speaking only from a listener's perspective. If you're lucky enough to be a member of such an ensemble, then you not only have the pleasure of sharing in creating the rich aural effects, but you know the joy of learning the music "from the inside" – of learning, that is, through your rehearsals, how the lines and sections and movements and harmonies fit together into an organic musical whole.

This week Kendal at Granville has been doubly blessed. On Sunday the Vintage Voices performed here. They are a Granville singing group that draws chiefly from seniors in the community, including of course some who are residents of Kendal. Their presentation was a musical narration of the Passion story, appropriate as Easter approaches. The pieces that comprised the tale were both familiar and unfamiliar, all lovely, and all demonstrating how the Vintage Voices continues to improve with each passing year. Happily, Kendal at Granville is a performance venue for this group two or three times annually.

Then on Tuesday evening the choir from St. Luke's Episcopal Church visited Kendal to perform Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. With its trimmed-down proportions, simplicity, and humanity, Fauré's Requiem is an ever-popular and stunningly beautiful work, and the audience of residents and guests received the presentation with even fuller applause than is customary for Kendal. As with the Vintage Voices, we were all pleased to see that there were some Kendal residents among the ranks of the choristers.

Each resident will doubtless have drawn his or her own lessons from the juxtaposition of the two singing ensembles. What sticks in my mind, beyond the sheer loveliness of the music, is the way in which the addition of the Amelia Gathering Room has opened Kendal to the talents of performance ensembles representing  a variety of art forms. As a consequence of the inclusion of this facility in our Phase II expansion, our community life is far richer today than it was just two years ago.