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CHORAL REVIEW
April 17, 2004
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By David Bithell
Conductor Michael Senturia spent just shy of thirty years building UC/Berkeley's University Orchestra progressively into something one might never have thought possible from the raw materials. Those who knew his work before his retirement from the University around a decade ago have had few opportunities since to experience his peculiarly intense brand of music-making, but a small and lucky audience Saturday night at the Berkeley Art Center got a chance to hear Senturia's musicianship in full flight — not with an orchestra, but with the chamber choir he founded, Coro D'Amici.
Coro D'Amici is clearly a group that enjoys singing together. Senturia conducts from within the ensemble, providing more encouragement than overbearing leadership. The musical choices Saturday, from the selection of music to choices of phrasing and balance, reflected an individual and group commitment to great music.
The program was very well balanced and included works by Poulenc, Hindemith, Philipp Blume, Trond Kverno, Michael Senturia, and Orlando di Lasso. On paper the program had the appearance of a concert of 20th-century music for unaccompanied choir ending with a single backward glance — a set of seven 16th-century madrigals from Lasso's Tears of St. Peter. In its attitude and awareness, however, I experienced the program in quite the opposite fashion. All of the pieces seemed to spill outward from the Lasso, reflecting in different ways the fascination of 20th-century composers and performers with music of the Renaissance. The same can be said for the chorus as well. With only nine singers, Coro D'Amici brings an intimacy and lightness to the newer music that has clearly benefited from their collective and individual experiences with early music.
The Tears of St. Peter is Lasso's final work, a set of twenty-one sacred madrigals composed shortly before his death in 1594. As part of an ongoing project to perform the complete set, Coro D'Amici's realization of seven of the madrigals provided a jeweled crown to the evening. The continually expansive sonority of these pieces was handled with a delicate sensibility and balance. The two newest pieces presented on the concert were both composed by members of the chorus. Croquis (“Sketch”) by Philipp Blume, currently a graduate student in music composition at UC Berkeley, is a setting of a poem in French by Rainer Maria Rilke. Written to honor a friend's wedding in 1995, the work explores a contrapuntal style and harmonic language that also honors earlier musical tradition. Though the permutational play that underlies much of his more recent work still belies a relationship with pre-baroque music, the tonal references, as found in Croquis, have been deeply submerged. Senturia's own 2004 Sunt lachrimae rerum, intended for Holocaust Remembrance Day, interjects the Latin “lachrimae” (“tears”) into a line in English from Virgil's Aeneid: “What place on earth is not full of the story of our sorrow?” The composition diverged the furthest of any work on the program from the spirit and techniques of Renaissance music. The opening meditation on “lachrimae,” while contrapuntal in nature, explored interesting echo-like effects and aimed at a disjointed continuity. Some of the isolated dissonant chords in the middle section of the work proved challenging for the singers, but, as with all of the pieces on the program, the intention and spirit of the work came across clearly. The program was completed with pieces by Paul Hindemith and Francis Poulenc from between the wars. The simplified elegance of Poulenc's Quatre Motets pour un Temps de Penitence (“Four Motets for a Time of Penitence”) and the whimsy of Hindemith's Six Songs on Old Texts, Op. 33 were each well rendered. This concert was a clear reminder of the beauty and flexibility of a small vocal ensemble. Coro D'Amici's performance subtly differentiated between a delicate overall blend and a more concentrated highlighting of individual singers (all were equally good as soloists, though a special mention is deserved by the tenors Bjorn Poonen and Rob Calvert). The members of Coro D'Amici are Philipp Blume, Rob Calvert, Pat Jennerjohn, Pauline Ma-Senturia, Sonja Maund, Jo Maxon, Carol Paxson, Bjorn Poonen, and Michael Senturia.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
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