IN PRAISE OF THE POWER TO EXALT (CONCERT REVIEW)

Of all music's powers music, the power to exalt is perhaps the best of all.

The Choral Union, University Choir and Southeast Missouri State University Symphony Orchestra delivered an evening of buoyant music Tuesday night, most of it inspired by the love of liberty and disdain for slavery that formed the American experiment and has tested it again and again.

An audience of about 600 attended the concert at Academic Auditorium.

The symphony directed by Dr. Sara Edgerton opened the program with Aaron Copland's stirring "Lincoln Portrait," with narration by Dr. Thomas Harte, a professor of speech at the university.

Harte's soothing voice perfectly matched Lincoln's words to Copland's distinctly American melodies, trumpets lonely as the plains and musical pictures as grand as any canyon.

"It is the eternal struggle between two principles -- right and wrong -- throughout the world ..." Lincoln said. "No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of men as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle!"

The evening's second work, "The Testament of Freedom" by Randall Thompson, turned the words of Thomas Jefferson to the same end.

"We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably waits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage upon them," the Choral Union sang, words taken from the "Declaration of Causes and Necessity of Taking up Arms" written July 6, 1775.

That Jefferson was speaking of enslavement to the British and Lincoln of enslavement to "the dogmas of the quiet past" made the pairing powerful. That either could have been writing about Kosovo created an undertow between them.

Choral Union director Dr. John Egbert closed the evening with Joseph Martin's "The Awakening," a work written to glorify music itself. A musical reverie subtly conveyed by the orchestra and choir powerfully imagined a land where song has died.

"No alleluia, not one hosanna, no song of love, no lullaby. And no choir sang to change the world."

Finally, the choir awakened to the deeply spiritual nature of singing and of music to praise "the Giver of the song."