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CHORAL MUSIC As through a Glass, December 6, 2002
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By Stephanie Friedman
The brief bios in Anonymous 4's program for their Christmas concert at Herbst on Friday show them to be gifted with a wicked, delicious sense of humor, and their program notes for the pieces show them to be avid scholars. But their onstage appearance and the first sound of their voices seemed to shrink them to something less than their publicized image.
Swathed and draped in various pieces of black and red, they reminded me of the young women who graced the ranks of certain college choral groups decades ago: earnest, good-natured, brainy, decorous, displaying a nonchalant attitude towards their dress, they favored the thin, pure, vibrato-less sound of boy sopranos; and when they sang in that fashion their voices seemed disconnected from their bodies. But they sang with enthusiasm and a desire to communicate.
Anonymous 4 seemed cut from the same cloth. Unlike the college singers, however, they are professionals: they have all had some vocal training, they work hard to make tonal blend and accuracy of pitch their hallmark, and their ability to sing in close dissonance, as in Peter Maxwell Davies's "A Calendar of Kings," is impressive. They are scholars of medieval music and maintain a vigorous performance schedule. But in their presentation of themselves and their singing they seem oddly unformed and zestless. With the exception of one (anonymous) singer their faces and bodies appear uninvolved in their singing. This disengagement extends to their words, which sound as if they are imprisoned in the singers' mouths. Consonants are suppressed, and vowels, those glories of vocal communication, are flaccid and incompletely formed. They have adapted the artlessness of the young girls' address, but not their enthusiasm and desire to communicate.
The exception mentioned above, who shall remain Anonymous 1, was facially and bodily involved with her singing, whether in the ensemble or as a soloist. Her solo turn, "Flight into Egypt," sung in Irish, reached the heart as few of the other songs and carols did. Her voice was a lovely instrument, but she enhanced its natural beauty by imparting to the audience her response to the text. Clear, pure high tones were not unusual among the group, but only hers shimmered with feeling — and this without vibrato. The other singers seemed to straighten their tone by depriving it of fullness, which resulted in a "flat" sound. Produced next to the harp accompaniments of Alyssa Reit on Celtic or concert harp, their tone seemed not only lifeless but flat in pitch. The harp, on the other hand, "vibrated" with meaning. The aforementioned Davies piece showed off the group's ability not only to maintain pitches at close intervals but to pick them out of the air as well. The performance, however might have been more acute with some imaginative phrasing, a quality not much in evidence throughout the concert. "The Seven Rejoices of Mary," a buoyant "numbers" folk song, had a beguiling accompaniment on the Celtic harp and demonstrated the group's excellent unison singing, but the words, as usual, remained obscured in the recesses of the mouth. Richard Rodney Bennett's setting of two verses from the 16th-century poem, "Balulalow," was a fetching lullaby, even if delivered with evident distaste for consonants. The second half was given over to Benjamin Britten's A Ceremony of Carols, usually sung by a chorus. Several of the carols would have benefitted from the heft of more voices, the beautiful "There is no Rose," for one, where a rich choral sound shaped into smoothness would have been more affecting. "This Little Babe" was replete with nimble, precise singing. It races to the final rousing verse, where a massing of voices might have driven home more tellingly the thrust of "My soul with Christ join thou in fight." The group, however, performed this section stirringly, intelligence and — atypically — spirit making up for the lack of numbers. Alyssa Reit's solo performance on the concert harp of Britten's "Interlude" in the Carols, was a high point of the concert, not because the reading was especially revelatory, nor because the piece was especially startling, but simply because it was delivered with considerable musical feeling and intelligent phrasing, clearly disclosing, together with the committed singing of Anonymous 1, what sacrifices had been made by the group in choosing, if choice it was, to damp down their enthusiasm.
(Stephanie Friedman, mezzo-soprano, has performed in this country and abroad, in opera and recital. She teaches singing at U.C. Davis and Holy Names College.)
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Anonymous 4