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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
April 2, 2006
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Local Wisdom By Jonathan Russell
St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Oakland was awash in gorgeous harmonies Sunday afternoon, as the San Francisco Choral Artists presented a concert titled "Wisdom of the Ages: Sages and Seers," featuring music on a variety of texts from the Renaissance to the present, with a particular emphasis on living, local composers.
The program interpreted its "Wisdom of the Ages" theme broadly and was divided into seven sets of pieces under the titles "Love," "Humanity," "Japanese Poetry" (which consisted entirely of Peter Schickele's After spring sunset), "Of Life and Death," "Social Conscience," "Birds," and "God." These groupings provided thought-provoking combinations of music and texts, and the stroke of genius tying it all together was ending the program with Leonard Bernstein's beautifully simple closing chorale from Chichester Psalms, "Hineh ma tov," with Lynnelle T. Bilsey on handbells. A setting of a Hebrew text meaning simply "Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity," the piece has a ritualistic, ceremonial feel to it, with the closing handbell notes acting like a priest's final blessing, or a hypnotist's finger snap, sanctifying our experience and waking us to the outside world once again. It was at this moment that it all came together and the program's inner coherence suddenly, and movingly, made sense.
The program featured works from a number of local composers, including Herbert Bielawa, L. Peter Deutsch, Henry Mollicone (currently the SFCA composer in residence), Wayne Eastwood, and Benjamin Taylor, the latter two of whom are members of the choir, as well as many other living composers, such as Peter Schickele (better known as PDQ Bach, but he also writes more serious music), Theodore Morrison, and Alice Parker. Works from such Renaissance composers as Johannes Eccard and Leonhard Lechner rounded out the performance.
While nearly all the pieces were quite beautiful, of particular note were Gideon Klein's eerie and chromatically expressionist, yet subtle and interior Madrigal; Theodore Morrison's deep and resonant A Chant for Peace; Peter Eben's dark, poignant From Life to Life, which moved unpredictably between unrelated major and minor triads; and Schickele's After spring sunset. Schickele's work was a setting of seven short Japanese poems in an unusual and original format: The first three poems were followed by a fantasy that combined all three settings into a larger-scale movement, followed by the next three poems, then another fantasy on those three settings, and finally a setting of the last poem. It was an inventive way to tie a cycle of different texts together. But while the settings of the poems were exquisitely detailed gems, the fantasies diluted their message and dulled their glow, like someone throwing three gourmet chocolate truffles of different flavors into a blender. It seemed that the composer was trying to create an unnecessary sense of unity and linkage between the settings instead of trusting them to stand on their own. Throughout the program, the choir's sound was exquisite, rich, and sensuous, with clear diction, beautiful phrasing, and a perfect blend. Director Magen Solomon's conducting was clear, precise, and poised, yet supple and completely free of tension, inspiring a warm, free, and open sound from her singers. My only complaint about the concert was its somewhat limited range of expression. Nearly everything was resonantly, sensually beautiful, and even in the few punchier pieces, like some of the more dancelike movements of Renaissance composer Leonard Lechner's Deutsche Spruche von Leben und Tod and Ysaye Barnwell's bluegrass-tinged On Children, the choir maintained its flowing sound and did not bring out the music's jaggedness as much as I would have liked. Not that these performances completely lacked punch, but the range of expression was limited by the insistence on always having a smooth sound. Solomon's selections of contemporary music likewise emphasized pure beauty of sound, rather than, as many other contemporary works do, fully exploiting the entire range of expression open to the human voice, including its more angular, raw, and percussive possibilities. But certainly any musical group is entitled to its own aesthetic taste, and ultimately I would rather hear an aesthetically limited but impassioned concert than one that half-heartedly covers all the bases. And in the end it's awfully hard to argue with something as deeply beautiful and moving as Sunday's "Wisdom of the Ages" concert.
(Jonathan Russell is a professor of musicianship at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and an editor with PBA Music Publishing. He is active in the Bay Area as a clarinetist, bass clarinetist, and composer.)
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