Dominick Argento and J. Reilly Lewis, photo courtesy of Cathedral Choral Society

Washington National Cathedral celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, on September 29, the date that the cornerstone was laid in 1907. To celebrate the centenary, the Cathedral Choral Society presented a commissioned work on Sunday afternoon, a new oratorio by American composer Dominick Argento. Having recently watched his wife die of an undiagnosable neurological ailment and also having turned 80 himself, Argento thought he had retired from composition. The persistence of CCS's director, J. Reilly Lewis, however, combined with a gentle suggestion by Argento's late wife to lead him to fulfill the Cathedral commission with Evensong: Of Love and Angels, dedicated to the memory of Carolyn Bailey Argento.

Vespers (Evensong) is a venerable and living tradition in the Episcopalian church, and that is the background of this new oratorio, which follows the basic outline of the service in the Book of Common Prayer. The scriptural reading that provides the basis of Evensong is taken from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of John. Argento focuses on the sick and infirm crowds huddled around the pool of Bethsaida (Bethesda), waiting for the miraculous cure associated with that place in Jerusalem. According to a legend, an angel would descend to the place and stir up the water, after which the first person to step into the water would be healed. The hope of a miraculous cure for a terminal illness is what appealed to Argento, according to his note in the program (Argento's wife spent her final days in a Bethesda Rehabilitation Center in Minnesota).

The liturgical context is rich, to be sure, of which only the surface has been scratched in Evensong. Musically, Argento's score was in the largely neoclassical style we have come to expect from him, with dissonances ranging from lush to acerbic almost always resolving to triads and perfect intervals. A striking main theme pervades the work, with its first three notes based on Argento's late wife's initials, C-B-A (that is, down a minor second and up a minor seventh). A series of chords based on the three-note motif (C major, B major, A major) is heard many times, too, and actually concludes the final movement, hovering in the distance over a D pedal point, denying a final sense of resolution.

Soprano Elizabeth Futral, photo by Christian Steiner

That kind of compositional complexity is what belies the superficial comparisons one could make between sections of this work and sacred pop by the likes of Paul McCartney or John Rutter. Yes, there were elements of the work that seemed facile or overly sentimental, but much of the piece had a quiet, shimmering beauty. The orchestration of the striking Phos Hilaron dialogue featured shiny trilling strings, harp swooshes, and bells, as backdrop to the traditional greeting of the Vesper light, reworked as the encounter of the healing angel and the afflicted. The performance was generally of an impressively high quality, especially the solo singing from clarion soprano Elizabeth Futral and delicate treble Nelson Reed. The mostly volunteer singers of the Cathedral Choral Society negotiated the difficult unaccompanied choruses with a well-rehearsed assurance, dropping in pitch only slightly during the orchestral tacet sections in the Nunc dimittis and Anthem movements.

Conductor J. Reilly Lewis is to be commended for succeeding in bringing Argento back to composition (WETA-FM has released an MP3 file containing a conversation with Argento and Lewis, led by Deb Lamberton) and for celebrating the National Cathedral centenary in such a magnificent way. The concert opened with a less successful rendition of Mozart's Vesperae Solennes de Confessore, K. 339. From my initial seat in the north transept, the large chorus and orchestra seemed more at odds than not, and the solo vocal quartet, who stood at the edge of the crossing facing down the nave, could barely be heard. The main reason to care about this piece at all is the Laudate Dominum movement, which Elizabeth Futral sang with beautiful clarity, but the Laudate pueri dominum movement has some worthy and unusual music, too. It was a nice touch to have William Culverhouse's Gregorian schola from the Catholic cathedral of Washington, St. Matthew's, to sing the opening and closing versicles and the Latin antiphons that introduced each of Mozart's psalm (and Magnificat) settings.

WETA (90.9 FM) recorded this concert for broadcast at a future date, and the live recording will be released commercially. The final performance of the Cathedral Choral Society's season will feature Mendelssohn's Elijah (May 18, 4 pm).