By Anne W. Semmes
Last Saturday afternoon there was some moving music presented to nearly 500 attendees of a 100th season concert by the Greenwich Choral Society (GCS) entitled “The Marvelous and Mystical.” Within that concert’s program including Benjamin Britten’s “Rejoice in the Lamb” and Leonard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” there was the premiere of a piece befitting “disturbing times, both politically and culturally,” so composed by Greenwich’s own Rob Mathes, called “Ah Love, let us Sing.”
The inspiration of that piece Mathes found in Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach.” He introduces in the concert program, those “disturbing times” as including “AI and the coming threats to our well-being.” He thought of utilizing some of the stanzas of “Dover Beach” to celebrate “the power of song to lift us up.”
The first line to be sung by the Choral Society and 45 Vassar College choristers indeed began with Mathes’ slight alteration of “Ah love, let us sing to one another,” from the original “Ah love, let us be true to one another.” Other lines included, “Sing a melody of renewal, a harmony of grace; The hope of singing together written on every face,” with that ending line of “Ah love, let us sing to one another.”
With Mathes’s piece as the finale, the audience rose in applauding praise with some having been brought to tears. With choir director Dr. Christine Howlett joining in the applause Mathes stood engulfed. “I was very happy, I was thrilled with the response,” said Mathes. “The Choral Society worked so hard on it, and they really loved singing it, as did the Vassar college kids. I went to their rehearsals – I was extremely encouraged. And then once the orchestra got it under their fingers on the final rehearsal on the Friday night, I felt like we were going to have a really good performance.”
“Yes,” reported Howlett, “The students really loved Rob’s piece, “Ah Love, let us Sing.” Her request to the board of directors of GCS if she could “repeat the program at Vassar with the Vassar Choir was granted. “So, the entire program will be performed again on April 10, 7:30 pm at Vassar College Chapel, in Poughkeepsie, NY.”
Mathes had wished to bring to the 100th anniversary of the Choral Society “something that could be sung by anybody in the audience when they leave this place, to ‘let us sing together.’” And “Normally when you write a brand-new piece, you promise the people that are commissioning it, that it’s going to be kind of fun and different and new… I decided to do it in a slightly tricky way, and that if you think of “Take Five” by Brubeck, it’s one, two, three, one, two… Everybody loves that beat. I made it as a group of three – a group of two, then again a group of two, and a group of three.”
Mathes shared that his composition, “Ah Love, let us Sing,” was commissioned by one of the choristers and board member Anne-Marie Hynes. “Rob did a great job,” said Hynes. “He certainly captured the love of singing in community and my husband Jim and I were just thrilled to hear the whole composition. And of course, I had a wonderful time practicing it with the Greenwich Choral Society because I love the Greenwich Choral Society.”
“Rob has his own inimitable style,” said Hynes, who told of Mathes having composed a piece for her and her husband’s 40th anniversary – “Always and Forevermore.” “It was lovely, and it was done in Christ Church as well. It was an amazing thing to have captured our family with some Irish themes. And we had looked through romantic Irish poetry to get some of the pieces for it. The Choral Society performed it 12 years ago. So, it was a delight to hear something else again that we were so fortunate to be able to commission and fortunate that he was the person that was able to generate the piece for us.”
Hynes had guested over two dozen for the concert. “To a person, they thought that it was, fulfilling, uplifting,, an amazing thing to hear…The idea of a group lasting a 100 years, throughout all different kinds of problems in the world, and good and bad things that happen in the world, is just an amazing thing to be able to do, and I have to tell you, it was wonderful to sing. I had about 25 or 30 people in the audience that I had invited, um, to come as my guests, and to a person, they thought that it was, um, fulfilling, uplifting, um, and it was something that they just thought was an amazing thing to hear.”
So, when will the public be able to sing along with his “Ah love, Let us Sing?” Perhaps it will be added someday to the GHS website? But Mathes is working to get it published – with GCS permission – along with another choral piece he wrote for GCS. “It’s a huge piece I wrote for my firstborn daughter’s graduation at Greenwich High School called “Far from Here,” which is a 20-minute piece in three movements, that also has a similar huge melody, and it’s really moving. One of my favorite pieces I ever wrote.” He’s hoping it will be sung elsewhere “but it’s written specifically for this beloved Greenwich Choral Society, which is a really special group of people. It’s one of the oldest choral societies in the country and one of the best. And they sounded glorious, didn’t they?” he said to this attending reporter.
