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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW Skill with Adventure November 9, 2002
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By Jules Langert
Thanks and a resounding “Bravo, encore!” to Robert Geary and the estimable San Francisco Chamber Singers for that rarest of treats, an a capella concert of new and recent choral music that made no compromises with conservative choral tradition. The pieces went their own way, often reaching deeply into some infrequently heard vocal territory. It was fascinating and stimulating to witness four gifted composers encountering a wide variety of texts, whose moods and meanings were a formidable challenge to their musical imaginations. Luckily, they were blessed with a chorus whose skill and dedication were mostly up to the task of performing these works with sympathy, insight, intelligence, and considerable tonal beauty.
There was the premiere of Tamar Diesendruck's The Mystery (2002), commissioned by Geary for the Chamber Singers. Setting an ancient Irish text that proclaims the attributes of God in seventeen powerful, aphoristic statements, the composer fashioned some striking vocal equivalents for the vivid imagery in each line of text. Like Handel's Israel in Egypt, where a different facet of nature is fiercely present in each musical number, The Mystery provided forceful, elemental settings of such lines as “I am the wind which breathes upon the sea, I am the wave of the ocean, . . . the ox of the seven combats, . . . the beam of the sun.” These were mostly very apt settings, though occasionally continuing for too long in the same way, or not really strong enough. Some of the best settings had the most unusual texts, like “I am a word of Science” and “I am the point of the lance of battle.” This was a rousing, inventive piece, given a clean and sure performance in spite of its many difficulties.
 Allen Shearer's Fables, to four poems of the twentieth century, took a very different path. Each poem in some way contained a strange and fantastic evocation of nature and the world around us, with mankind a comical or uncomprehending presence in its midst. Expressing the whimsical aspects of such an idea, Shearer tended to isolate the individual lines of text, giving them to one or two sections of the choir, while the rest of the group accompanied with a stream of wordless vocalizing that heightened a mood of playful fantasy. Most memorable was the final song, "The Pleasure of Merely Circulating," text by by Wallace Stevens, a poet whom Shearer has frequently set to music. Here the accompanying voices have a calliope-like refrain, but the lines of verse take on a troubled, ominous edge, giving the song an enigmatic, surreal tinge, unsettling and strange.
In Wayne Peterson's A Robert Herrick Motley, four of the five poems he chose hover in an atmosphere of pointed wit and light-hearted melancholy, without the sharply etched contrasts that can be so fruitful for musical adaptation. Peterson's full, sumptuous textures, with their beautifully wrought harmonies and long, elegant lines, captured the words, trapping them like so many birds in a gilded cage. A sameness pervaded these settings, where rhythmic and textural surprises might have liberated a poem's meaning. Instead, the music seemed poised with a kind of deferential eloquence, sometimes marking time while a line of verse completed itself. The final song, "The Hag," depicts a wild night ride with the devil, and here Peterson forswore eloquence, in a chorus of shouts, cries, moans, whispers, and all kinds of bizarre noises. Yet the effect was of a purely musical experiment, with the text relegated to the status of just another one of the sounds, mostly tagging along to enjoy the bumpy ride. The program began with "The Gentlest Thing" by Trevor Weston, a lovely, meditative setting of lines from the Tao Te Ching. Its central conflict between gentleness and hardness was beautifully represented by luminous major triads, brushing repeatedly against harsh dissonance, the meaning increasing and intensifying as the piece gradually unfolded. This rewarding concert was marred to some degree by the acoustics of St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley. The voices were in many ways enhanced and allowed to blossom and ring out, but much of the ensemble detail became swallowed up by the pervasive echo. The vocal sound had no crisp edge, and consonants were often fuzzy, with inner voices running together. Performances by the choir were good and convincing, but would have benefited from a stronger contrast of dynamics, and richer nuances. Some pieces, like Peterson's "The Hag," needed more work, and in The Mystery, sopranos sometimes entered late when they were needed on top of a strong harmonic passage. Several more performances in an acoustically drier environment will surely correct the few glitches in this otherwise exhilarating achievement.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Robert Geary