San Francisco Classical Voice

EDITORIAL Past Performances, On The Record

May 25, 2004

By Robert Commanday

Making a recording is a dreaded affair for the musician. Whether closeted in a studio or — even more isolated and alone — in an empty auditorium, the situation is, at best, nervous and tension making. Normally when you (and the ensemble, if there is one) are alone, you're practicing or rehearsing, and time does not stand still; make a mistake, so do it again until it's right. But with the microphone there and perhaps labor costs mounting with every repeated take, and the artificiality of a performance without an audience, the situation is abnormal.

Another thing — the performer listens to the playback, and more often than not that's a little nightmare. The senses are keyed up, the awareness of everything that transpired while recording is magnified, again like a nightmare in slow motion — this botched note, that blurred attack, that phrase a little distorted, this tempo change just not quite what had been rehearsed, and so on — the flaws leap out, exaggerated a hundredfold in a musician's imagination. The strange thing is that when the performer hears that same tape six months later, conscience and memory still denouncing the experience, time has cast a spell and the reaction is quite possibly a surprised, " Hmm, that wasn't so bad. No, it's pretty good." The "mistakes" or regretted spots turn out to be negligible, hardly noticeable for the good qualities that dominate.

In the heyday of big company classical recording, the engineering took care of all the flaws, and the performer(s) repeated the problematic passages or phrases, leaving it to the technicians to make the undetectable splices. Now, the changed economics of recording have compelled performers to record "live," either at concerts or, even without an audience, still straight through whole compositions or movements. No splicing patches. Better for everyone, the performer and the listeners to the published recording.

Singing without a net
A new CD just issued by the performing group itself (another new practice, eliminating the "middle man" record company), comes right out and celebrates the recording "live" process. It's called "Volti, Live, singing without a net." It is a compilation of unedited performances given between 1998 and 2003 by Volti, the former San Francisco Chamber Singers, in celebration of its just completed 25th season. This highly recommended CD is available through the website, Volti

Volti specializes in contemporary works, with which it has established an admirable niche for itself. Here it presents the works of eight contemporary composers. The standards that conductor Robert Geary meets are as high as the most persnickety listener could want, and the sense of liveness, the presence and excitement, is clear. It is hard to tell where engineered controlled recording would be an improvement. The one exception is the unequal balance between the percussion and the singers in Mark Winges' "Unbecoming: Songs for Dancing" (the other works on the CD are a capella).

Contemporary choral works tend to fall into a few large categories. Two of Winges' three Songs and "Iz kamna v vodi" ("From a stone in the water") by the Slovenian composer Lojze Lebi use the voices instrumentally for percussive and dramatic effect. In "Vision," Winges has the choir articulating just phonemes, no words, for effects of rhythm, sonority, color; and it's vivid. In "Iz kamna v vodi, " Lebi goes all out in the range of vocalization, including laughter, shouts, whispers, rapid fire speech-singing (in Slovenian), the chorus as percussion plus actual percussion instruments. This is a dramatically forceful, jolting piece, setting a kind of a mystic, barbaric spell.

Exuberance & sonority
Belonging to another class of choral works, harmonically inventive in style, Winges' two other "Songs for Dancing," to poems by Denise Newman, builds chords for their sonorities' sake, achieving a delicate poetic or impressionist mood, the percussion creating an envelope of color, the rhythm on the whole, regular. There is also use of non-pitched, speech-like singing. The rhythmic continuity is fairly steady, calm, but the actual musical movement is slow.

Wayne Peterson's "Carol" (William Austin's "All this Night, shrill Chaunticleere . . ." early 17th century) explores the phrasing, rhythm and exuberant character of the text. While the setting is largely homophonic, the harmonic manner is distinctive, the choral writing sonorous setting, the harmonic manner distinctive. The words come clear, their sound and feeling communicated, a tribute to Peterson's gift and the skills of Volti and Geary.

"Dream" by Arne Mellnäs is another harmonically original piece, Mellnäs layering up his chord/sonorities with exquisite dissonances, the rate of change and rhythm almost as slow as Winges'. He plays with the disorderly feeling of a dream, prompted by interrupted parenthetical style of e.e. cummings' elaboration of "Now I lay me down . . . " Cummings' poetic language inspires some lovely music, and singing. More adventurous still is the second of two György Kurtag pieces, the brief "Már csak a jövö idot kivánom" ("I wish to be in the future"), a gem with its counterpoint between paired voices, the rich yet tense harmonies, and cascades of fanciful vocal sliding, in cascades. There's a lot in a short piece.

A wordy patter
Works by the CD's first three composers conform to a comfortably graceful style of tonal harmony that's been dominating the choral world for 30 to 40 years. Tom Flaherty's "A Timbered Choir" (to Wendell Berry) includes two pleasantly lyric pieces, "Best of any song" and "I was wakened" (not too far in style from Britten) bracketing a patter/chatter scherzo to a poem whose wordiness is lost unless one follows the printed text. There are two pleasant works by Jacob Avshalomov in the set "When Summer Shines."

More to the point in this idiom was Kirk Mechem's triptych "Winging Wildly." Sure in this tonal language, Mechem used bird sounds made of word fragments for accompaniment, "Birds at Dusk," created a haunting mood, "The Caged Bird," and produced an exuberant "Everyone Sang." Mechem's feeling for the language and its sonorities are fine but the consistently euphonious harmonic style softens the expressive effect. Volti's performance in all of these was first-rate.

(Robert P. Commanday, the senior editor of San Francisco Classical Voice, was the music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, 1965-93, and before that a conductor and lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.)

©2004 Robert Commanday, all rights reserved