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CHORAL REVIEW
The New-Music Side of Chanticleer November 8, 2001
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By Eric Valliere
With a program that featured three world premieres, Chanticleer renewed its commitment to the expansion of the choral repertoire, delighting devotees of challenging music and elegant singing. As part of "In A New Light: Two Days of Discovery" the group opened its season last Thursday
at the First Unitarian Universalist Church in San Francisco with a concert aptly titled "Creating A Legacy." Combining pieces that have become an established part of the group's repertoire with brand new works by Mark Adamo, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez, and John Musto, Chanticleer delivered performances that showcased its flexibility and fearlessness.
Sustained, wordless open fifths bring the listener into the Japanese sound-world of Jackson Hill's Voices of Autumn (1982). A chant, rich with glissandi, soon overlays this spare interval and the rest of the choir contributes various dissonances in and around it. An extremely gentle pulse persists and the chant gradually develops into more of a cry or lamentation. It is a portrait of isolation and Chanticleer's flawless rendering of it created the appropriately haunting, poignant mood.
Although less certain, the group's performance of Mark Adamo's Canticle (2001) was no less committed. Adamo clearly is comfortable with “wrong-note harmony”: progressions that have tonality at their heart, but are shot through with dissonant arrows. His setting of the first poem, “Pied Beauty”, exploited this technique to good effect; Chanticleer negotiated the fancy harmonic footwork with ease. In “The Poet Speaks of Praising,” Adamo divided the choir for a dialog, a dramatic device that was musically unconvincing and one that created the evening's only real technical insecurities for the singers.
John Musto's Five Motets uses a similar harmonic language, although it is occasionally more adventurous. Calling on texts from writers as varied as D.H. Lawrence, Li Po, and the Gospel's Luke, the pieces are, in the words of the composer, “meditations on mortality as seen through the lens of nature.” Each setting is distinct in character, from the waltz-like “The Day We Die” with its refreshing contrapuntal imitation, to the galloping “Question” with its insistent ostinato. Musto has the good sense to allow the men periodically to sing long phrases, instead of merely to declaim text. They warmed up to the piece nicely and brought it to a somber close. The performance of Sol de Doce (1997) by Cuban-born composer Tania León matched the music's vitality and exuberance. Although the poem's message ultimately is one of sorrow, its imagery is rich with singing, playfulness, and nature's boundless energy. León has conjured up a swirl of sound, brief and vibrant, that dances and surprises with nearly every phrase. One particularly successful tactic: she constantly divides the singers into new groupings, of six, four, three, two, even one to a part, to affect a shifting tapestry of musical narration. Ms. León — who told the audience that this was her first choral work — understands the immense resources at her disposal and exploits them to their fullest. The result is a breathless celebration of life's potential in the face of despair.
Based on the shattered hopes and “years of frustration and suffering” of the unsuccessful — and therefore forgotten — men and women of the California gold rush, Carlos Sanchez-Gutierrez' Of Gold (2001) is a psychologically complex evocation of the darker side of hope. The poems have a sense of desperation and impossibility but Gutierrez does not rely on the text. Rather, he extracts the vowels and consonants from these spare poems and rearranges them for his own purposes, crafting intimate miniature portraits that depict the conflicting emotions of these lost pioneers. They are abstract portraits, to be sure, but no less clear for that. The music creates sharp impressions: cool, bare dissonances are the bitter loneliness and desolation and years of relentless drudgery; a maelstrom rising from the depths of the ensemble is the “great golden force” found in the dark, mysterious earth. The choir chatters repetitively in a frenzy of obsession with the ever-elusive gold. This most challenging of pieces to interpret was also the most rewarding, and Chanticleer's stark delivery let the music speak even in the absence of words. It is perhaps a feat of the imagination to picture the refined members of Chanticleer engaged in a Mohican mating dance; but the aural picture they provided was a worthy substitute for the visual. In his Night Chant (1997) Brent Michael Davids calls for vocalized drums and shakers as well as a nose flute. The powerful bass chanting of Eric Alatorre provided the foundation over which the rest of the group was able to loosen up with nasal cries, pointillistic mating calls, and other manly outbursts which built to the appropriate frenzy before relaxing into a comfortable afterglow. (Eric Valliere earned his doctorate in composition from New England Conservatory in Boston, where he has also served on the Musicology faculty. He currently serves as Executive Director of the San Francisco Chamber Singers and administers the Noe Valley Chamber Music Series. His critical writings have appeared in New Music Connoisseur and on Andante.com.) ©2001 Eric Valliere, all rights reserved |