Magnificat [Donkin]

Conductor Notes:

This piece is being enthusiastically taken up by women’s choirs all over North America. With its chantlike solo by a mezzo soprano throughout, the piece has a beautiful sense of serenity and shape. The rest of the choir is divided into 10 parts that pick up and sustain notes of the solo line as they pass, resulting in beautiful note clusters that die away organically as each singer finishes her text or her breath and waits for her next entry. This may be the first experience for your singers of this kind of choral writing, but the concept and layout are clear in the score and they will quickly see how easily they can master their part. The choir surrounds the audience around the concert hall and the effect for the listeners is spellbinding. Every time we have performed this work, people come up to us to tell us how magical the performance was. In addition to leading Elektra in this piece, I have conducted a 160-voice all-state high school women’s choir in it and broken the solo line into six segments to give more of the girls a chance to be a soloist. The singers loved the piece – I think about 40 of them auditioned for the solo lines! A note when dividing the choir on the other lines, the tessituras of the lines are not in any order from 1 to 10, so I recommend a mixture of sopranos and altos on each one.

Text:

Magnificat text (abridged in the solo voice) sung in Latin.