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CHORAL REVIEW
June 6, 2003
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By Kaneez Munjee
If Chanticleer's audience has experienced a concert like this before, it was quite a long time ago. From evocation of the wind to the likeness of a didgeridoo, the twelve men of Chanticleer gave a masterful performance Friday night at St. Joseph's Cathedral Basilica (San Jose) of music inspired by many different cultures and religious and musical traditions.
“Sound in Spirit: The Healing Power of Music” was centered around twentieth- or twenty-first century pieces which take their inspiration from non-Western cultural traditions. The first clue that these were going to showcase an unexpected sonic world came with the opening of the first, “Incantation” from Jan Gilbert's NightChants, in which an unseen solo singer offered a wide-ranging improvisatory, pitch-bending melody to the accompaniment of sounds of the wind. Other movements from NightChants, based on Sanskrit and Navajo poetries, also featured solo voice with a changing drone by the other eleven singers underneath, or a solo voice accompanied by percussion instruments. Sarah Hopkins' Past Life Melodies took a similar wordless drone but further manipulated the sound by the changing of the vowels as the singers walked around in a circle. The vowel-manipulation slowly evolved into the sonic effect of a didgeridoo, which then was trumped by harmonic-overtone singing, in which separate voices “weave and dart like golden threads above the earthy drone sustained by the main body of the choir” -- an ethereal effect.
Yet the most arresting manipulation of voice and sound came in Motet for 12 Singers by Carlos Rafael Rivera. The motet consisted almost exclusively of the five sacred syllables of the Tibetan Buddhists: Bhyo, Hum, Om, Hsi, Kye. Its effects ranged from pitch-bending, drone and glissando to the most percussive elements of speech, in which the singers were in fact not singing at all but were exploding single consonant sounds from those five syllables to create continually diverse sound effects.
Impressive and innovative as these pieces were, they were not as compelling as Jackson Hill's In Winter's Keeping, a 2001 setting of a seventh-century Japanese poem using pentatonic harmonies and Japanese tunings. In this — as in Hill's Voices of Autumn, William Byrd's Ave verum corpus and Patricia Van Ness' Cor meum est templum sacrum — Chanticleer's signature blend, vocal purity and dynamic expressiveness were all at the fore. (This program gave the world concert premiere of Cor meum.) Other musical highlights were Jesse Antin and Christopher Fritzsche's light, clear solos in Hildegard von Bingen's O clarissima mater; the entire group's unified flow and pace of the Gregorian chant hymn Ave maris stella; and “Graces to You” (NightChants), a melodic setting of a Byzantine text that Chanticleer used very effectively as an exit processional at the end of the concert. The audience's pick of the evening was a thirteenth-century Gallo-Portugese song (Como pod' a groriosa by Alfonso X de Castille), featuring tenors Kevin Baum and Michael Lichtenauer, bells, drums, and vocal drones, reminiscent of the style of many of Chanticleer's well-loved Mexican Baroque performances. But the audience also showed its appreciation for the innovation and diversity of Music Director Joseph Jennings' program and the twelve singers' superlative artistry by a nearly-unanimous and well-deserved standing ovation. Adding to the surprises of the evening, Jennings appeared on stage with the ensemble, replacing an ill singer.
(Kaneez Munjee is a singer, writer and editor. She is currently a doctoral
candidate in Musicology at Stanford University.)
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