BRUNSWICK — The Vox Nova Chamber Choir, a polished, flexible group that specializes in contemporary choral music, is devoting its two concerts this season to the desire for peace. It is a universal theme, you would think, although if it were truly universal, the world would be enjoying it rather than hoping for it.

The choir presented the first installment, “Da Pacem: Music for Peace in Our Time,” at Bowdoin College’s Studzinski Recital Hall on Saturday evening. The second, “Inscription of Hope,” will follow in June.

Much of the program was sacred music, with texts that focused more on faith than on peace, as such. In one case, a wonderfully zesty arrangement of “The Battle of Jericho,” the subject was not peace at all, regardless of whether the weapons used in the battle were spears or a combination of rams’ horns and shouting.

Still, Shannon Chase, the choir’s director, got quickly to the heart of her intended theme in the striking opening work, the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’ “Raua Needmine” (“Curse Upon Iron”). An unusual score, composed in 1972 and sung in Estonian, it does what its title suggests, cursing iron as the element that has given us modern weaponry, and branching out, in its final verses, to extend the curse to titanium, chromium, uranium, plutonium and other elements that have been put to bellicose purposes.

To give the curse heft, rather than leaving it simply as something mentioned in a sung text, Tormis cast the piece as a ritual, with a single drum accompanying the choir, and the text often chanted rhythmically, sometimes in a near whisper, sometimes with vehemence and anger, rather than sung. There are sung sections as well, of course, and with the drumbeat and chanting providing context, these sections sound more climactic than they might otherwise.

The Vox Nova singers endowed the piece with a palpable sense of drama and menace, and a listener was so fully drawn into the maelstrom of its rhythmic chanting that it wasn’t until the second work, Arvo Pärt’s “Da Pacem Domine,” that one realized that to perform it, the choir had set aside its greatest strengths – the warmth of its sound and the precision of its blend.

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The Pärt was performed by 16 of the choir’s 40 singers but was the picture of lushness, as was the Rudi Tas “Miserere” – a work with a cello line that offered a sort of response to, and commentary on, the choral line – that followed it. Steven Weston, the choir’s assistant conductor, led the Tas, and Timothy Garrett played the cello line with a rich, singing tone.

Other works that showed off the velvety warmth of Vox Nova’s sound were Eriks Ešenvalds’ gauzy “O Salutaris Hostia,” René Clausen’s invitingly serene “In Pace” and Kenneth Lampl’s “Jerusalem,” a poetic meditation, sung in Hebrew, with an attractive vocalise winding through the texture.

Striking, too, was a group of hymns and spirituals, in which Chase and Weston split the conducting duties, each stepping into the choir while the other was on the podium. Chase noted, in comments from the stage, that two of the selections, “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “The Battle of Jericho,” were favorites of Martin Luther King Jr. The choir captured the vibrancy of these works, and the arrangements by Roy Ringwald and Moses Hogan, respectively, in performances driven by a compelling balance of energy and suppleness.

Allan Kozinn is a former music critic and culture writer for The New York Times who lives in Portland. He can be contacted at:

allankozinn@gmail.com

Twitter: kozinn


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