Knack for the Future

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Judging by the programming choices of many of our major musical institutions, choral music belongs strictly to the past. Fortunately, forward-thinking music lovers can always turn to Volti. Under founder and Music Director Robert Geary, the San Francisco-based ensemble is one of the Bay Area’s most consistent musical treasures, one that maintains high standards of excellence in the present while vigorously developing the repertoire of the future.

Sunday afternoon at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, the group offered a splendid demonstration of its approach with a program combining works from its past seasons, recent Volti commissions, and a premiere of a work composed for its 2008 Choral Arts Laboratory. Conducted with care and precision by Geary, and sung to a tonal sheen by the 20-member chorus, the program closed the group’s season on a decidedly high note.

Titled “Past, Present, and Future Adventures,” the program included works by Ronald Caltabiano, William Hawley, Aaron J. Kernis, George Lam, Eric Moe, and Steven Stucky, and spanned nearly the entirety of Volti’s 29-year history, from the eldest entry, Hawley’s 1981 Two Motets, to the newest, Lam’s 2008 Words Become Unlatched. Each work received a polished, energized, fully committed performance.

With the opening work, Stucky’s 1996 Cradle Songs, Volti’s voices made a thrilling first impression. The composer’s settings of three folk lullabies elicited a pure, silken ensemble sound from the group, beginning with the hypnotic Brazilian song “Rouxinol do Pico Preto,” followed by the gently insinuating Polish Christmas song “Lulajze, Jezuniu” and the lively, lilting “Buy Baby Ribbon” (from Trinidad and Tobago).

For sheer sonic beauty, though, the afternoon’s high point came in two excerpts from Kernis’ 1998 Ecstatic Meditations. The composer incorporates texts by the 13th-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose writings, as the title suggests, blend faith, poetry, and sensuality in a fertile marriage. Kernis matched them with braided vocal lines, pulsing dance rhythms, and, in the second setting, a startling depiction of an intimate dance with God. The work calls for a spirited performance, and Geary and his singers delivered gloriously.

Rippling Sonic Possibilities

Geary continued to explore the sonic possibilities in Hawley’s Two Motets. The composer’s setting of two Roman texts — “Mosella,” by Ausonius, and “Te Vigilans Oculis,” by Petronius Arbiter — is for double chorus, with the four voices of each group further divided into two. The settings are quite different: “Mosella,” composed in major mode, depicts the colors and rippling patterns of the Mosel River, while “Te vigilans oculis,” which shifts to the minor, describes a lover alone at night. Yet Hawley links them handsomely with long, luxuriant phrases. Geary and the singers, positioned around the perimeter of the church, rendered them transcendent.

More brilliant text-setting was to come, in Caltabiano’s 1993 Metaphor, a trio of short settings by William Blake (”The Fly”), John Donne (”The Flea”), and Walt Whitman (”A Noiseless Patient Spider”). In each, the chorus evokes natural activity — a buzzing canon for the persistent fly, a graceful interweaving of vocal lines for the flea, the industrious casting of “filament, filament, out of itself” for the spider. Geary conducted briskly, and the singers made each one sound wonderfully distinct.

Moe’s O the Flesh Is Hot but the Heart Is Cold (a 2005 Volti commission) proved likewise evocative, with a densely constructed setting of text from Matthea Harvey’s prose-poem “Baked Alaska, a Theory of” from Sad Little Breathing Machine. This is a fairy tale for a contemporary audience, with the title phrase sung as a country song, and the moral of the story, “Love, love, love,” woven in gleaming strands of sound. Volti sang it with obvious relish.

Representing the newest end of the spectrum was Lam’s Words Become Unlatched, a set of seven madrigals Volti commissioned for its Choral Arts Laboratory this year, and being premiered on this program. Lam and his collaborator, poet Benjamin Rogers, built a mosaic from fragments of sound and text, with relationships as the dominant theme — “two latch onto each other out of desire,” it begins.

The chorus delivered the message in eloquent spoken, as well as sung, episodes; tenor Michael Eisenberg stepped out of the group to supply a violin solo. Words Become Unlatched seems intended to recall the chatterings of a conflicted brain. And while Rogers’ texts proved aptly incomprehensible, Lam’s cut-crystal score rang with clarity.

Georgia Rowe is a Bay Area arts writer. Her work has appeared in Opera News, Gramophone, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, and The Contra Costa Times.