The Music of Gabriel Fauré Celebrated at Assembly Hall

Paul Meers conducts the choir

If "texture" is the term used in music for how all parts of a musical piece relate to one another, then polyphony defined the latest concert held on May 12 in Assembly Hall by the AUB Choir and Choral Society.

In a marvelous end of the year musical event, the masterpieces of Gabriel Fauré (1845-1924) were celebrated in a program that featured performances by the Ensemble Polyphonica, a new group of gifted Lebanese singers, accompanied by the National Lebanese Chamber Orchestra.

The concert delivered a mix of French, Greek, and European secular and religious songs culled from the repertoire of Fauré, who was influenced by such contemporaries as Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Wagner, and Lizst, as well as by Fauré's own friend and mentor Camille Saint-Saëns.

The evening began with the ensemble's rendition of Les Djinns, a poem by Victor Hugo reflecting the author's fascination with the macabre. The ensemble was then joined by the choir and the orchestra in performing the remaining pieces on the program, which were punctuated by the voices of baritone Samer Badr and soprano Yasmina Sabbah in their rendering of the polyphonic Madrigal and the Pavane, which received significant acclaim.

The choir kept the best till the end, however, with a touching performance of Fauré's rendition of the Mass of the Dead, called Requiem, due to its association with the votive mass for November 2. The occasional dramatic Fauré outbursts added to the otherwise traditionally subdued melodic piece a note of life and hope to the audience as it savored the timeless masterpiece.

The AUB Choir is formed by students taking a one-credit course in music and usually merges with the Choral Society, a group of non-student singers, in order to present a combined AUB Choir and Choral Society concert. Their joint concert with the Lebanese National Chamber Orchestra and the Ensemble Polyphonica was directed by Paul Meers and organized by AUB's Fine Arts and Art History Department and the newly established Zaki Nassif Music Program.

The singers were accompanied on the organ by Ramzi Sabra, MD.