by Justin Soutar
Back in 2013, I was visiting the popular British sheet music website
Score Exchange (where I happen to sell some of my own music), searching for a
good piano arrangement of the familiar and timeless Schubert
Ave Maria.
As I combed through the search results, I stumbled upon a completely
different, and much more recently written,
Ave Maria for soprano solo, SATB choir and piano
that I had never seen or heard before. Using the site's Scorch playback feature
to listen to the score on my computer (a mechanical device that gives a rough
idea of how it should really sound), I found the unfamiliar music so hauntingly
beautiful, richly complex and deeply moving that it became permanently engraved
within my consciousness, impossible to forget. In fact, the emotional impact of
this contemporary classical work dated 2005 was on par with the
well-known classic
Ave Maria compositions of Schubert, Bach/Gounod and
Mozart. The site's description revealed that this piece was actually the
composer's own piano reduction and SATB arrangement of his
original version of the
Ave Maria published in 2003, which was written
for soprano, SAA chorus and orchestra.
The writer of this particular
Ave Maria, a certain
Bruno Vlahek,
was also unfamiliar to me. Checking out his biography on Score
Exchange, I learned that he is a remarkably gifted, world-renowned, award-winning Croatian
composer and virtuoso pianist my own age, which meant--incredibly--that he
had turned out both versions of this
Ave Maria in
his late teens. Since the piano/choral score was offered free of charge on
the website at that time, I printed out a copy for myself, and during my
leisure time on Sunday afternoons, I would occasionally amuse myself
by attempting to play some of the piano part, which was quite complex and difficult
with its simultaneous natural and syncopated rhythms and a half-dozen
triplets thrown into a steady drumbeat of sixteenth and thirty-second
notes. I longed to master the entire piece, but given my work schedule and
commitments at the time, this was a pipe dream.
Then in late 2016, the good Lord gave me my dream job as a
full-time music director at Saint Patrick Catholic Church in Lexington,
Virginia. Realizing that 2017 would be the one hundredth anniversary of
Our Lady's apparitions at Fatima, I decided that we should do something special
musically to mark this important centennial, and I felt that the glorious but
obscure Vlahek
Ave Maria would be perfect for the
occasion--something definitely off the beaten path that was beautiful and
memorable. Here was a chance to publicly honor the Blessed Virgin Mary while
sharing with the congregation a magnificent piece of music they had never heard
before and would probably never hear otherwise. When I shared
an excellent YouTube video performance of this score with the
pastor, Father Joe, his reaction was the same as mine had been a few years
earlier: "It's different, but I like it." He gave it his blessing right
away.
So early in 2017, I rose to meet the formidable
double challenge of mastering the piano part and teaching our little
sixteen-member volunteer choir and soloist to sing the beloved Latin prayer to new melodies and unfamiliar rhythms. Initially
the choristers were somewhat cool toward the piece and intimidated
by the difficulty of the material, but after two months of patient rehearsal
beginning in May, their attitude had changed from trepidation to enthusiasm;
they had discovered that this challenging new
Ave Maria was
actually fun to sing! After three more months of prayer and diligent
practice, as well as valuable advice and assistance from one choir
member who is a band director, we were ready to present this stunning hymn to
the Blessed Mother just in time for the conclusion of the Fatima centennial.
We finally presented the
Ave Maria by Bruno Vlahek on October 29, 2017,
during the 10:30 AM Sunday Mass with approximately 180 parishioners and
visitors in attendance, my band director friend conducting the choir, and
my small digital audio recorder going. While not perfect in every detail,
our rendition was well received, eliciting spontaneous
applause. As far I know, this was the first time it had ever been
publicly performed in the United States. Father Joe responded with
an immediate public request for an encore presentation on December 8,
2017, the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
Somehow, with our conductor and one other choir member absent, we
managed to execute it nearly perfectly at the 5:30 PM Mass that
Friday evening. (Regrettably, I failed to snag an audio recording of this
spectacular achievement.) Our third presentation, which fell somewhere in
quality between the first and second attempts, took place during the 5:30 PM
Mass on August 14, 2019, the Vigil of the Solemnity of the Assumption of
the Blessed Virgin Mary.
I'm deeply grateful to the Lord and to his holy Mother for granting and
obtaining for me and our little choir the talents and graces necessary to learn
and share with our parishioners and visitors this awesome but largely
buried contemporary Marian hymn masterpiece. It is no small
accomplishment to have such a challenging world-class piano and choral work
firmly in our liturgical music repertoire. I'm eagerly looking forward to
performing it again as soon and as often as we have the opportunity to do so.
My sincere hope is that our past and future efforts to share the Vlahek
Ave
Maria with others will contribute to making this jewel
of twenty-first century Catholic classical music more
widely performed, known and appreciated, so that it may eventually
earn the honored and secure place it certainly deserves in both the Church
and the world’s great musical treasuries.
Copyright © 2020
Justin D. Soutar. All rights reserved.
