A passion for music

Michelle Marr

Get Brian Dehn talking about music and his voice fills with enough

wonder and joy he could as well be describing a vision of heaven.

Sunday, Dehn will bring his irrepressible delight in music to

Cantiones Sacrae, a summer concert presented by The Meistersingers, a

40-voice chamber choir he directs.

The program will feature 13 sacred songs, from late Baroque to

21st-century compositions, all of which, Dehn says, are “passionate,

with thick sonorous textures.”

The a Capella music will include Antonio Lotti’s “Crucifixus,”

Frank Martin’s “Mass for Double Chorus a Capella,” widely regarded as

one of the greatest a capella settings of the Mass in French style,

and the California premiere of Finnish composer Einojuhani

Rautavaara’s “Vigil in Memory of St. John the Baptist,” which Dehn

describes as “a breathtaking, almost barbaric composition of raw

emotion ... power chord after power chord.”

Rautavaara’s composition includes quartertones and tone clusters,

which require skilled soloists as well as a choir. It is rarely

performed but when it is, Dehn said, “It satisfies the soul with

amazing compositional techniques.”

The choir will also perform the West Coast premiere Musica animam

tangens (Music’s breath of life), which won its 22-year-old composer,

Joshua Shank, the American Choral Directors Assn. 2003 Raymond W.

Brock Student Composition Prize.

Dehn majored in choral conducting, vocal performance and music

education at Chapman University. As an undergraduate he conducted

throughout California, the Western United States and Italy, including

at the Sistine Chapel in Rome, St. Mark’s in Venice and the Benedetto

Marcello Conservatory in Florence.

He later conducted the William Hall Chorale during its tour of

Eastern Europe and conducted other ensembles in the Berliner Dom, St.

Mathias in Budapest, St. Thomaskirche in Vienna and throughout

Germany, Prague, and the Czech Republic.

He is an accomplished tenor soloist who has performed with the

William Hall Chorale, The New Century Singers and Opera Chapman. The

music director of The Meistersingers, he is also currently parish

conductor and assistant music director at Sts. Simon and Jude

Catholic Church and conductor of the Orange County Catholic Chorale.

The Meistersingers is a volunteer association of musicians

dedicated to performing the finest of choral music in concerts made

free to the public. The choir presents two or three performance of

one summer and one Christmas concert each year in venues chosen to

have a beauty and elegance equal to the music.

The choir, a nonprofit corporation with a seven-member, volunteer

board of directors, depends on charitable donations and patron

support to meet its expenses and to serve its mission.

The group began with 28 members with the shared vision of choral

music as a profound resource for the elevation of the human spirit

and the desire to foster the promotion and evolution of the choral

art.

For all its skill and its difficult repertoire, it is not an

auditioned choir.

“I don’t audition voices,” said Dehn. “They kind of just come.

They weed themselves out. If they can hack it, they stay.”

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].