San Francisco Classical Voice

Magen Solomon

At Saturday night's concert at St. Gregory Nyssen Episcopal Church, Magen Solomon, Music Director of the San Francisco Choral Artists, admitted to the audience that it was not a particularly original idea to program a retrospective of American choral music in these waning days of the twentieth century. Original or not, Solomon and the 20-voice Choral Artists presented a beautifully-sung concert notable for its variety, structure and content.

The program featured a well-chosen mix of old chestnuts (Randall Thompson's Alleluia), choral classics (Samuel Barber's The Coolin'), new music (John Kelley's When You Are Old) and little-known gems (Edward MacDowell's Slumber Song). The program was organized in sets of pieces that took us chronologically through most of the decades of this century, beginning in the 20s and progressing to the 90s, but ending with two selections from the 1890s, a clever way of bringing the concert full circle. In fact, Charles Ives's Psalm 54, a piece from the program's final set, was in many ways the most musically daunting work on the program. Ives's dizzyingly complex harmonies, a challenge for any choir, were clearly delivered and enthusiastically sung.

John Kelley's affecting setting of Yeats's touching poem When You Are Old was another of the program's highlights. (Solomon informed the audience that Kelley had recently won the G. Schirmer Young Composer award, reward for which was the publication of this piece.) The text was carefully set, and the Choral Artists delivered the words with just the right mix of clarity and affection.

Throughout the concert, the Choral Artists produced a lush, warm tone, singing with abandon in Leonard Bernstein's Spring Song, while tempering their sound nicely for the intricacies and cool harmonies of Elliott Carter's Musicians Wrestle Everywhere. The sectional blend was nearly always precise, and the balance and tuning were fine as well (particularly noteworthy since two of the four tenors had to bow out at the last minute due to emergencies). The singers delivered the musical phrases with a definite sense of purpose and direction, and the diction was nearly always clear without getting in the way of the musical lines.

Several of the Choral Artists were featured in small solos throughout the program. Tina Harrington's gutsy, dead-on delivery in Duke Ellington's rarely performed Come Sunday was wonderful. As might be the case with any program featuring so much variety, not every piece was a winner. John Harmon's treacly I Raise My Glass seemed more suited to the off-Broadway stage than the concert hall, and Peter Schickele's meandering After Spring Sunset, settings of Japanese haiku, could be descriptively subtitled "Six Texts in Search of a Composer."

Overall, however, the concert was a resounding success. When it was over, the audience clamored for more, and Solomon and the Choral Artists obliged by repeating a work from earlier in the program: Alice Parker's rousing arrangement of Hark, I hear the harps eternal, a fitting end for a wonderful tour of the American choral art of the past century.

(Frank Albinder is in his eleventh season with the male vocal ensemble Chanticleer, works regularly as a choral clinician and adjudicator and is a former college choir director.)

©1999 Frank Albinder, all rights reserved