“Poetry into Song”
Washington Master Chorale
March 5 at 5 p.m.
National Presbyterian Church
4101 Nebraska Ave., N.W.
$40-60
washingtonmasterchorale.org

After 10 years as a singer and board member with Washington Master Chorale, Diane Kresh decided to end her tenure. But before leaving, she wanted to express her gratitude by gifting the group with something truly beautiful. 

The result is composer David Conte’s “The Unknown Sea” a commissioned chorale piece based on the texts of famed American poet Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979). Originally the piece was slated to end the chorale’s 10th season in 2020, but because the pandemic had other plans, it’s now debuting as part of WMC’s “Poetry into Song” on March 5 at the National Presbyterian Church.

The idea, Kresh explains, was to create a legacy project, a gift to the chorale from her for many years of making music with a special group of people including WMC artistic director and dear friend Thomas Colohan. Also, Kresh wanted to include a salute to Bishop, whose detailed yet non-confessional style she greatly admires. 

Kresh’s affinity with Bishop is partly based on similarities, both gay and feminists. Also, Kresh, who enjoyed a long career at the Library of Congress, appreciates that Bishop spent a brief stint as a consultant of poetry at the library many in 1949.  But mostly, Kresh loves the work of women writers, and that’s something she wants to celebrate. 

Bishop knew great success, friendship and romantic love, but her early years were marked by tragedy. She was a baby when her father died, and just a few years later her mother was permanently institutionalized with mental illness. For a time, Bishop lived happily with her maternal grandparents in Nova Scotia and then her father’s wealthy parents spirited her off to New England. She graduated from Vassar in 1934. 

Using inherited private income, Bishop travelled broadly and frequently. Evident from her life and work is a search for home and an interest in coasts. She lived in Brazil for some time. 

When Kresh’s commission was still just a thought, she and Colohan reached out to Conte, a prolific San Francisco-based composer who has written 150 works of which 40 involved the words of poets, both living and dead. Kresh wanted twenty minutes of music based on Bishop’s words with a mezzo soprano solo built in.  

Initially Conte, who is gay, wasn’t sure if he was the right man for the job. He knew of Bishop’s poetry but not well. But the deeper he dove the more excited he became. And he had no objections to Kresh’s requests, so they moved ahead. 

For his new choral orchestral work, Conte draws on Bishop’s “One Art,” a widely admired poem that’s at once deeply personal yet a throwback to tradition and reserve. 

“It’s about losing keys, a house, and finally losing a loved one. Increasingly, the losses become more intense,” he says. “The tone of the poem is so interesting, a quiet but confident acceptance of loss as a part of life, wry and humorous and brave all at the same time. It took me a while to penetrate the personality that’s in the poetry.”

The commissioned work is an amalgam of queer talent. When a gay composer sets the words of a gay poet, there’s no question of shared experience. Conte says “While we have more freedom than Bishop experienced, there’s still a shared oppression, feeling like an outsider, having to discover identity because yours is inexact.”  

For both artistic and practical reasons, WMC is pairing “The Unknown Sea” with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s cantata, “Dona Nobis Pacem,” based on work by gay poet Walt Whitman and texts from the Hebrew Bible and Latin Mass, re-orchestrated by British composer and conductor Jonathan Rathbone.

Both Kresh and Conte will be in attendance for this long-anticipated premiere. 

“I’m excited, but a little sad I won’t be singing,” says Kresh. “It’s a sometimes bright, sometimes elegiac piece that has legs; I hope other groups and audiences will experience the same kind of joy that we’ve had making it.