San Francisco Classical Voice

"Intimate Grandeur" was the title of the Sanford Dole Ensemble's concert Sunday afternoon, and exactly right. Dole had invited his audience at St. Gregory of Nyssa Church in San Francisco to hear anew or afresh works written for large choruses, as sung by his eight-voice ensemble. And indeed this was a successful way to make clear the intricacies of Renaissance polyphony and 20th-century tonal complexity.

Dole spoke the program notes from his music stand. Though most directors aren't particularly good at this, Dole does it very well, putting pieces in their historical context and having his singers provide musical illustrations of such esoterica as canons and ostinato figures in Schönberg and polytonality in Elgar and Ives. My only quibble with this approach is that a concert should begin with singing, the opening remarks deferred until after the first piece.

The concert began with two Renaissance pieces: Giovanni Gabrielli's Jubilate Deo and Heinrich Schütz's Jauchzet dem Herren. The Gabrielli was somewhat lacking in dynamic and rhythmic variety, and some of the singers were better able than others to link changes of character to changes of the meter. Gabrielli's prize student, Schütz, outdid his master in contrasting sound and texture. A solo quartet in front was echoed by a second at the back of the room, to charming effect.

Before jumping from the Renaissance to the 20th century, Dole told his audience to expect a different style and sound, since a straight tone was more appropriate to the Renaissance. The sound was less different than he imagines. Perhaps a conscious effort to straighten the sound accounted for the somewhat boring effect of the Gabrielli -- or maybe his writing just needs the odd bit of brass to bring it alive.

Sergei Rachmaninoff's Magnificat, sung in English with interpolated Russian Orthodox refrains, alternates sections dominated by low and then high voices--an effect brought off remarkably well by these eight singers substituting for a deep-voiced Russian chorus. An even more remarkable feat was the performance of Arnold Schönberg's big Friede auf Erden, marked by excellent phrasing and timing, and a big Romantic sweep. Here Dole's mastery as a conductor was evident, as the sound built and ebbed and came to the thrilling tonal ending.

Two pieces after the intermission used polytonality in very different ways: Edward Elgar's There is Sweet Music and Charles Ives' Sixty-seventh Psalm. Both juxtapose a quartet of women with one of men. In the Elgar, the quartets alternate a half-tone apart, begin to converge harmoniously, and end quite tonally. The text is a poem by Tennyson, used in wonderfully imaginative ways as the composer reaches back into the poem for certain phrases to repeat. This is a totally engaging masterpiece. Ives, in contrast, puts his men in g minor and his women in C major and has them stick to it, simultaneously, from beginning to end--a real clash. It was fun--and enlightening--to be told that Ives' father delighted in doing just this, having his kids play or sing a song in one key while he played it in another on the piano.

The concert ended with David Conte's opus l, Cantate Domino, for two SATB quartets. It is characterized by an interesting distribution of voices, alternating thin soloistic textures with full choral sound in a highly sophisticated way. A second performance of Elgar's enchanting Sweet Music served as encore.

This was a concert well conceived, well prepared, and sung superlatively well. The performers were Sanford Dole, tenor, and Cheryl Keller, soprano, both outstanding interpretive leaders; Marcia Gronewold and Elspeth Franks, mezzo-sopranos equally accomplished as sopranos and altos; Heidi Waterman, alto, and Antoine Garth, tenor, both of whom gave sweetness and depth to the inner voices; Chad Runyan, a versatile baritone, and Tom Hart, a solid bass. Bravi to all.

(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University [lecturer emerita] and director of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)

©1999 Anna Carol Dudley, all rights reserved