No Winning Combination

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Three performances that ranged from superb to problematic, three pieces that ranged from problematic to superb — match up the combinations and you come up with Saturday’s concert by the University Chorus and the University Chamber Chorus at Hertz Hall at UC Berkeley.

The concert began with a terrific rendition of Steve Reich’s 1986 version (reduced strings, no brass) of Desert Music, with the University Chamber Chorus and Worn Ensemble, impressively conducted by David Milnes. For 46 minutes of relentless pulsation, percussionists on xylophones, vibraphones, and marimbas kept perfectly to their paces. The intonation of the chorus was spot on and, for the most part, the words were clear. Milnes was particularly effective in making sure the many accents were articulated sharply. The rest of the chamber orchestra missed nary a note, blending successfully with their fellow performers.

But the music, despite the all-too-evident structure and significant literary content of William Carlos Williams’ antiwar poetry, wears down those who aren’t minimalistophiles. Unlike the music of Philip Glass, Reich’s music has plenty of fascinating subtlety. The trouble is, that very subtlety detours the active listener from going into the proper trance — the only way to avoid damage from marimba-xylo-vibraphone burn. It’s like taking a warm shower: delightful at first, as the spraying pulses stimulate the skin, but do it for 46 minutes and the skin (and psyche, in the case of Reich) becomes waterlogged and wrinkly.

Yet many people seem to love endless aural showers. Donal Henahan, when reviewing Desert Music’s first American performance for The New York Times, declared that “a generation reared on the monotonously simple rhythms of rock music provides just such a public” for an enthusiastic reception to Reich’s music. And indeed that was the response in Hertz Hall.

After more than a half hour of intermission, the University Chorus took the stage to perform James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados (Sacred songs), composed in 1989. Superimposing Latin religious texts on protest poetry from Latin America, Cantos poses a challenge to any chorus. Guest director Aya Ueda is to be congratulated for taking it on, for the results were of a quality to fairly assess this music of the Scottish-born composer whose takes on liberation theology have earned him an international reputation.

Intense Drama

The three poems set by MacMillan are intensely dramatic. “Identity,” by Ariel Dorfman, deals with the discovery of yet another political victim, “disappeared,” as a corpse in a river. The poem’s Latin text refers to delivering the souls of the faithful from the pains of hell. The second poem, Ana Maria Mendoza’s “The Virgin of Guadalupe,” questions why there is a shrine in Mexico, “where my brothers the Indians lived,” “a thousand thousand killed,” dedicated to the “Patron Saint of the Conquerors” from Spain. The Latin text reinforces the irony with “Hail, Mother, portal of heaven.”

The final and most dramatic poem, again by Dorfman, has the captain of a firing squad say, “Forgive me, compañero” to the condemned such that “the echo of his voice and of those fingers on his arm fills his body with light … and he almost does not hear the sound of the shots.” The Latin reads: “For our sake he was crucified.”

Would that the music matched the poetry! While the Latin superimpositions reinforce ironies, they are at times laid on ineffectually. Clarity is sacrificed without a corresponding musical payback in dynamic or harmonic intensity. I was especially disappointed that the musical representation of “I tell you his body fills with light” sounded more like sludge than photons.

By contrast, there are impressive moments at the beginning of the first poem when the tempo and phrasing projects how word spreads among the people that a body has been found — “What did you say, they found another one?” The slow, grandiose conclusion of the first canto, “I can bury my own dead,” is also quite powerful.

Needless to say, getting all the disparate lines together is a must for this music. For most of the time, in her conducting Ueda succeeded in doing so, with only one serious lapse in the return of the line “Sweet Virgin of Guadalupe” near the end of the second canto. A further complication lay in synchronizing the organ part, which Susan Matthews performed at her console located above and behind the stage. While adequate for the MacMillan, this distance became an issue in the concluding work of the concert, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

Oomph Out

The Psalms is performed almost as often nationally as Bernstein’s most popular pieces, and deservedly so. It contains wonderful melodies, infectious rhythms, and every bit as much drama as the MacMillan. The orchestral version is replete with Bernstein’s genius of orchestration, but when shorn of that the version with only drums, harp, and organ removes much of the oomph from the music. This must be replaced in one way or another by choral power and excellence.

Unfortunately, neither was much in evidence in Saturday’s concert. In the first movement, the main melody, reinforced by instruments in the orchestral version, simply didn’t emerge from the chorus alone. In the second movement, Jack Lundquist did a fair job as a slightly weak, watery, but on-pitch boy soprano in the second movement, though the chorus fell out of synch in the “Why do the nations rage?” section. Furthermore, the harp was overamplified.

Matthews’ organ introduction to the third movement was effective, though later she and Dan Levitan on harp could not stay together — a spatial difficulty that perhaps could have been resolved by Ueda in rehearsal. The gorgeous melody on “Adonai, Adonai” (with its breathtaking shift to a subtonic chord a half-step down from G to F-sharp major, a trick perhaps learned from George Antheil’s Fourth Symphony) was well sung, but it suffered from excessive rubato here and there. To add to my overall disappointment with this performance, neither of the solo quartets used in the outer movements was up to the challenge of the few notes given them.

Given the combinations of piece and performance — problematic/great, OK/OK, and great/problematic, respectively — I’d settle for problematic/great any day. At least with that combination, the composer will have received his proper day in court, and familiar expectations will not have been dashed.

Jeff Dunn (jdunnpm@yahoo.com) is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.

Comments

I was very glad to see that SFCV covered this ambitious program by the UC Berkeley music department’s choral ensembles. It would have been great to read acknowledgment of the director of the Chamber Chorus - John Kendall Bailey - who prepared the chorus for Reich’s extremely difficult Desert Music. The chorus deftly sang the 8-part octatonic chords and difficult rhythmic canons. I have prepared this piece, and know how difficult it is for chorus.) I heard the premiere in New York in 1984, and was very moved to experience how well the piece holds up. It is a visionary work, with a text, perhaps, as relevant to our time as Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” was to Beethoven’s time.

Posted by David Conte on April 29, 2008 at 8:57 pm
Dear Mr. Dunn,

Thanks for your kind words about the Chamber Chorus/Worn Ensemble performance of “The Desert Music”. The Chamber Chorus particularly wishes to thank John Kendall Bailey and David Milnes, who generously undertook the preparation of the chorus and conducting of the performance (respectively) when an emergency made our original conductor unable to join us. Taking on a piece like this on such short notice is no laughing matter, and we simply couldn’t have done it without them.

Jen Wang (UCB Chamber Chorus)

Posted by Jen Wang on April 30, 2008 at 7:42 am