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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
March 10, 2007
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Discordant Energy By Noel Verzosa
At the end of Creative Voices' all-Poulenc concert at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley, on Saturday night, Director Eduardo Mendelievich thanked the audience for braving the music's dissonance. It was an overly generous gesture — partly because the characteristic bite of Francis Poulenc's choral writing is frequently (and skillfully) countered by his tender treatment of dynamics and declamation, but largely because these subtle dissonances were sometimes obscured by Creative Voices' unbalanced sound.
The group's strength lies in its full-ensemble energy. The first piece on the program, Sept Chansons (1936), allowed the ensemble to show off the work's powerful homophonic sonority, handily filling the church's resonant acoustic. Many of the work's movements rely on dramatic swells of dynamics to give shape to the music, and in this Creative Voices did not disappoint.
Creative Voices It was less successful with the subtler nuances of inner voices. That is where Poulenc's dissonances frequently happen, and the effect was often lost when the ensemble's outer voices overpowered the inner ones. And when the music consisted of short phrases in rapid succession, as in the second and third songs in the set, Creative Voices frequently sacrificed diction and accuracy for tempo and energy. Nor did the ensemble always coordinate the quality of its individual members. The last movement of the Sept Chansons contains a duet for soprano and alto, which Mendelievich delegated to a vibrato-heavy singer and a straight-toned singer. The result was two independent lines that did not meld into true harmony.
Mendelievich's conducting, however, was a joy to behold. He used his entire body, swiveling his hip here, springing from a crouch there — even though his efforts did not always produce an audible result in the singing. Watching his kinetic enthusiasm, you'd never know that these pieces were written in the midst of World War II or that their texts, almost all by the surrealist poet Paul Éluard, were clandestine protests against Germany's occupation of France. Yet, Mendelievich's conducting did its job, because the chorus vividly captured the (paradoxically) somber subtext of these pieces and reminded us that, though none of the works on the program was explicitly religious, they all clearly belong to Poulenc's austere "religious period." For example, the chorus sang the opening song of Un Soir de neige (1944) with all the reverence of a sacred motet — the style that the composer surely intended to evoke. It is a chilly brand of religiosity, to be sure, one more akin to Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms than Dufay's Ave maris stella, but one that Creative Voices succeeded in turning into a poignant expression of wartime despair. The final piece of the evening, Poulenc's Figure humaine (1943), contains many of the same nuances that challenged the chorus in Sept Chansons. Some of the problems thus resurfaced, such as in the notoriously tricky second movement, which requires the performers to sing in rapid staccato (a task made more difficult by the vowel-heavy French language). Creative Voices' honorable attempt sometimes produced confused, disjointed echoes. But as the piece wore on, the ensemble warmed to the task. The fifth movement requires the singers to simulate the rhythms of an instrumental oom-pah accompaniment, which they executed with ease. The seventh movement begins with a fugue — an extreme rarity in Poulenc — which the chorus pulled off admirably, deftly navigating the jagged melody without sacrificing rhythmic precision. The final movement allowed the singers to play to their strengths. The text, Éluard's patriotic "Liberté," reads like a speech whose refrain — "I write your name" — grows in intensity with each iteration. (As is common in performances of Figure humaine, the chorus preceded the final movement with a spoken, abridged recitation of the poem.) Poulenc's music reflects the poem's emotional trajectory with a gradual crescendo spread across the last four stanzas, the melody's range expanding ever higher, culminating in a triumphant intonation of the movement's title. Here, Creative Voices found itself in its true element, transforming the individual singers into a single, many-voiced entity. The final quadruple-forte chord, capped by the sopranos' only slightly faltering double-high E, was enough to bring the crowd to its feet. Given the obvious joy that Mendelievich takes in the music, as well as the reciprocal joy that his chorus takes in performing for him, it was a well-earned ovation.
(Noel Verzosa is a graduate student in historical musicology at UC Berkeley.)
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