Get ready for a big dose of happy: Fresno Master Chorale celebrates the joy of humanity with Haydn’s masterpiece ‘The Creation’

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“It’s just so blooming fun that you forget by listening to it that he’s really a very intellectual composer,” Hamre says. “It’s a remarkable piece of music.”

2. The piece itself is a remarkable success story.

After 50 years as a composer, Haydn loosened up, and you can tell.

He lived in an era in which music composition was strict and mechanical – based on form and architecture. Precision and structure were highly valued. For half a century, he excelled at this almost mathematical approach to music.

Then he shifted gears for “The Creation.”

“After all of these years becoming a genius at form and architecture and structure, he suddenly realizes he’s going a whole different direction,” Hamre says.

“The Creation” is based on the book of Genesis and John Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” which means that the opening of the piece is supposed to feel unformed. Before the creation there was the void, which is about as far as you can get from the perfect form and rigid musical architecture that Haydn had excelled in for so many years.

“The void is nothingness, it’s chaos,” Hamre says. “There’s no form or structure.”

Several minutes in, the famous command is issued: “Let there be light.” The choir belts out the famous line: “And there was light!”

It’s the first time you hear a C-major sonority in the piece, Hamre says. That’s where the joy really kicks in, and it doesn’t stop for 75 minutes.

Views of the Fresno Master Chorale: Hamre conducts the ensemble in concert, above. Below, three chorale members in the recording studio.

3. The piece was a big hit.

“By the end of his life, Haydn was kind of a rock star,” Hamre says.

She has always been impressed that Haydn was able in the last years of his life to change his style and help pave the way into a new era of musical history. To write his most brilliant work at the end of his life was to show what a great lifelong learner he was, she says. He went beyond form and used the tools of music for programmatic, not just structural, reasons. In other words, he wrote to create the mood of the piece, not just construct the notes.He essentially wrote the first Romantic oratorio.

If you listen closely, you can hear hints of musical revolutions to come in the 20th century — in allusions to a future Schoenberg, say.

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4. There are three soloists.

The chorale will be joined by Frank Pitts (bass), Jonathan Elmore (tenor) and Jennifer Paulino (soprano). They will be joined by 165 singers and a full orchestra. If you’ve never witnessed a Fresno Master Chorale performance at Shaghoian Hall, you’ll marvel how they manage to fit that many people on stage.

5. There’s a modern sensibility to the piece – just a touch.

Hamre decided to use a version of the piece arranged by the highly regarded composers Alice Parker and Robert Shaw. (It isn’t far from the original, but this version does update some old-fashioned terms and tidy things up a bit.)

Hamre got the opportunity to meet Parker at a concert in Salt Lake City several years ago. (Parker passed away in 2023 at the age of 98.).

Hamre calls the encounter a “treasured memory.”

Which is surely what she’s hoping for audience members.