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CHORAL REVIEW
October 2, 2004
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By Eric Valliere
For a concert entitled “Women, Saintly and Otherwise” it might be reasonable to expect a concert devoted to women composers, their points of view, even the issues that concern them socially or aesthetically. But Chanticleer's take, for their performance in San Francisco's Calvary Presbyterian on Saturday night, defied this expectation by instead presenting music about or inspired by women. Thus women – for the most part – were given a rather passive role in the proceedings, and the marketing angle seemed little more than a flimsy excuse for the choir to trot out some of its favorite and vocally most flattering pieces in an impressive range of genres and styles.
Of course, an ensemble of Chanticleer's polish needs no excuse, and choosing works that brought out their best qualities meant a treat for their audience, especially those less familiar with the standards of the repertoire. Even for jaded listeners, the “Ave Maria” of Tomas Luis de Victoria is a masterpiece that never gets tiresome. Victoria's layers of harmony and changing meters always thrill, and the subtly shifting textures provided a perfect venue for the purity of Chanticleer's sound. Their gentle, luxuriant phrasing allowed the music to breathe (the same was true in their performance of the “Ave Maria” plainchant that preceded the piece). A stranger choice was Vassily Titov's “The Angel Cried Out.” Titov's debt to Heinrich Schűtz was clear from his reliance on polychoral techniques (and monotonous over-reliance on the perfect cadence). The piece was somewhat trying despite a clear and forceful performance.
Following their opening set in Latin and Russian, the choir switched to English for Thomas Weelkes' “As Vesta Was from Latmos Hill Descending,” and then to Italian for ”Matona mia cara” by Orlando di Lasso. The Weelkes was as good as you are likely to hear, and the Lasso charmed with its easy humor and effervescent texture. They seemed less sure about Poulenc's ”Margoton va t'à l'iau,” although the character of this droll little work came through.
The real meat of the first half came at the end, with four selections from Claudio Monteverdi's Sestina, performed virtually without pause. Written shortly after the death of one of Monteverdi's favorite singers, these madrigals convey a sense of loss and longing, with the long, melancholy phrasing that this composer is known for. Throughout, there was a throbbing undercurrent of sorrow that ultimately emerged in the final song with cascading cries of anguish in the very impressive soprano section. The sound was uniquely hair-raising, and utterly moving. Cary John Franklin's “The Uncertainty of the Poet” is a setting of a poem by Wendy Cope, inspired in turn by a painting by Giorgio de Chirico in London's Tate Gallery. To my ears, it seemed to be about a kind of identity confusion between a poet and/or a banana (unfortunately the text was omitted from the program) …in any case it was a dryly witty piece of puffery, performed with panache. Augusta Read Thomas has set several of Emily Dickinson's poems for Chanticleer (in a larger work called Purple Syllables); they chose three for this performance. Thomas' intentions are recognizably more serious than Franklin's. Her work is marbled with chewy dissonances, usually building from the bottom up in an additive fashion, but no less satisfying for that. The choir's confidence seemed to waver somewhat in the declamatory final song, “Upon his Saddle sprung a Bird,” as tuning forks emerged and the easy joy of the 18th century gave way to the more thorny challenges of the 21st.
No such trouble with Eric William Barnum's “She Walks in Beauty.” This work (inexplicably chosen as winner of Chanticleer's 2003 composer competition) could as easily have been written in 1803. It was purely diatonic, with consistent meters, predictable textures and regular phrase lengths. Yet even as an anachronism, it rather failed the test of invention or even charm. Chanticleer's composer-in-residence, Jeeyoung Kim, contributed two arrangements of traditional Korean work songs (as reported by tenor Fraser Walters, at least one of them was sung while women sorted and dried seaweed). What a strange juxtaposition of styles they were! Relying heavily on western ostinati (they inhabited an incongruous Gene Puerling sound world), the pieces seemed not to know what they wanted to be. Ms. Kim seems to have transcribed the folk tunes and directed that they be declaimed in an aggressive, nasal – presumably “authentic” – vocal style. But then she accompanied the melody with jazzy harmonies and syncopations in the lower parts. Put together they simply didn't work. Gustav Holst had a better ear for folk-tunes, as evidenced by his arrangements of “Swansea Town” and “I Love My Love.” First bawdy and then touching, the men of Chanticleer sounded as full and manly as ever. When a male choir sings “all the parts” – including soprano – there is inevitably some gender-bending required in performance. For “The Ballad of Frankie & Johnny,” soprano Eric Brenner sang the voice of Frankie, who's man Johnny “done her wrong.” The ensemble's performance had a languorous heat to it, slow and sultry, and a wry deadpan delivery that belied the easy surface humor. For an encore, they brought out the spiritual “Keep Your Hand on the Plow,” which gave soprano Dylan Hostetter a chance to shine in the evening's only big solo. If nothing more, this selection proved that the twelve men of Chanticleer can make a very big sound indeed, even if the potpourri program did little to alter our conception of the fairer sex.
(Eric Valliere completed his doctorate in composition from New England Conservatory in Boston, where he was also on the Musicology faculty. Currently, Eric serves as Executive Director for Volti (www.voltisf.org) and the Noe Valley Chamber Music Series (www.nvcm.org), and as Managing Director of the BluePrint Contemporary Music Project (at the SF Conservatory). His critical writings have also appeared on www.classicstoday.com and he is a frequent contributor to www.andante.com.)
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Chanticleer