San Francisco Classical Voice

A noted music scholar once observed that successful programming comes down to the alternation of "the lovely" with "the frisky." At the San Francisco Chamber Singers' "Composers Here & Now," heard Thursday night at the Yerba Buena Forum, the lovely all but anesthetized the frisky in a program featuring two world premieres and commentary by three of the five living composers represented. While the singers rose admirably to the technical challenges of this repertoire, the program itself had the effect of a gallery of still lifes.

The seventeen singers encircled the audience for John Cage's ear for EAR, an aleatory work in which a melodic formula intoned by a soloist (James Fernando Lowrie) was repeated in unmeasured imitation by the other singers. The spatial separation of the voices enhanced the ethereally shifting textures, from solo to canon to unison, recalling medieval chant.

Conductor Robert Geary sensitively shaped the lines of Canti d'Amor, by Bernard Rands to poetry by James Joyce. The finely tuned ensemble negotiated Rands' experiments with rep-rep-repetitions, wordless undulating tone clusters, and sparsely floating ostinato effects. However, the surprising lack of contrast in this selection of five movements generated little enthusiasm to hear the remaining ten.

Composer Mark Winges and poet Denise Newman discussed the genesis of their collaboration Wishes Night. They concurred on the negotiability of the text, at times chosen more for sound than for meaning. Newman connects chains of alliteration ("bubble, trouble, trap of the hold/ tensely seeking relief of the cold"), while Winges renders the incomprehensible unintelligible with glissandos, whispers, vocal sound effects.

Though the unabashed romanticism of Earl Kim's Some Thoughts on Keats and Coleridge may have been an evolutionary regression in musical style, its polish and cohesiveness reduced the previous works to vocalises in retrospect. The Chamber Singers homed in on its Elgarian style, with the burnished sound of the women and the clarity of the diction rising to unprecedented levels. Shed No Tear, a text by Keats, had a nostalgic feeling of Viennese operetta.

Kirke Mechem's elegy on the death of John F. Kennedy, Forsake Me Not, O Lord, is an impressive chantlike intonation of the psalm, with impassioned pleas. The Chamber Singers unleashed the first thrilling forte of the evening ("and one shall rise up at the voice of a bird"), and the composer justifiably commended their mastery of his difficult score.

Too much of the evening, however, was "singing about singing," an impressive display of vocalism without communication. Without the audio, the visual impression alone would have given listeners little clue as to the prevailing emotion being expressed. Earnest attention -- no matter how precise the score-reading -- is insufficient to convey the complexity of the lyrics. The ensemble excels in producing a floating, nicely balanced sound, but it does so at the expense of passion and personality.

Ironically the work that received the most convincing attention to text was the only work on the program in a foreign tongue (and Finnish at that!). The lilt of Scandinavian folk song pervades Pekka Kostianinen's setting of a folktale from the Finnish epic Kalevala. The vivid musical narrative passes right through the language barrier, and the singers were absorbed in its vivid characterization.

Paul Chihara's Three Pastoral Elegies proved anticlimactic, returning to the languid affect of much of the program. Chihara fitted two earlier and poignant works with a new companion, Under the Greenwood Tree. A pastiche both musically and textually, it juxtaposes texts by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and John Fletcher with whimsical snatches of "I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now" and witty Elizabethan madrigalisms.

(Bruce Lamott is choral director of the Philharmonia Chorale and the Carmel Bach Festival. He is also an instructor in music and Western Civilization at San Francisco University, and conducts choral classes in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's Extension Program.)

©2000 Bruce Lamott, all rights reserved