Calgary's Renaissance Singers and Players celebrate 50 years of keeping tradition alive

Nicholas Žekulin is a lifelong fan of singing the classics — not the '70s funk or '80s rock and roll classics— he prefers 16th and 17th century pieces. 

Žekulin has been singing with the Calgary Renaissance Singers and Players for 47 years. He sat down with the Homestretch's Doug Dirks for a chat ahead of the choir's 50th anniversary performance. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

Q: How would you define Renaissance music? 

A:  We interpret it extraordinary broadly, anything from about the eighth century through to the 21st century. But the core of it is the 1500s and the 1600s.

Q: How did the Calgary Renaissance Singers & Players get started? 

A: It got started as so many things did back then. We're talking here about 1970, obviously, and there was a newly appointed professor of English at the University of Calgary, Anthony Petti, specialist in Renaissance English literature and Renaissance music, and he was supposed to give a public lecture.

That was before you had a huge number of recordings, just about the start of the interest or broader interest in early music.

So he went around knocking on doors, pulled in colleagues, students and everything else, put together a choir to illustrate his lecture. They enjoyed it so much — not the lecture, but the singing. That was the beginning.

Q: How did you get involved? 

A: I got involved almost accidentally, although I've been singing this music for much longer. One of my sisters had joined the choir and it was summertime. There was a couple in the choir who were having a baptism for their baby [and] they wanted some music. They were short. So [the choir] hauled me in and I never left. 

Q: What do you like about singing Renaissance music?

A: I simply enjoy the music.

It's satisfying to sing because it has both emotional and intellectual sides to it. And you really have to learn to balance those to do it.

I was hauled in as a pupil in the second year of high school into a choir to celebrate the 50th anniversary, as it happened, of a local church. 

Q: Why do you think your group has lasted this long in Calgary? Fifty years is a long time.

A: Fifty years is a long time. I know that it's lasted because the people want to sing.

And, of course, if you're going to sing, there's a kind of an expectation that you also perform.

The music, I won't say it's popular in the normal sense, but there is an audience out there who enjoy this and enjoy hearing it live.

Q: You've been with this group now for 47 years. So what has that been like? Has your voice changed over the years as you've matured?

A: Oh, yes. Yes, it has. I'm not sure it's always improved.

I've changed voice parts. I've done just about everything with that choir.

Q: What can people expect this Sunday? 

A: We're calling it the Renaissance Treasures. The program was put together around the favourites of many of the choir and then filled in a bit. And since most of the choir like serious songs, we actually had to add a section that we're calling Vices that has smoking, drinking, sex, murder and stuff like that.

Q: So a real crowd pleaser, then? 

A: We haven't got quite as far as public executions, but we're working on it.

Q: If you could pick a song, which would be your favourite Renaissance piece? 

A: Oh, I have a lot of Renaissance pieces but I think I have to go with that piece that I started out my career with 60 years ago. 

It's an absolutely fantastic, classic choral piece, but for choir only, by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, the composer's Sicut Cervus, which is the setting of Psalm 42.

Catch the Calgary Renaissance Singers and Players' performance of their show Renaissance Treasures I: Gloria! this Sunday at 7 p.m. at St. Stephen's Anglican Church, 1121 14th Ave. S.W.