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CHORAL REVIEW
Superb Choral Singing On War, Picasso, Hope
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By Frank Albinder
The subject of war has inspired monumental musical works and The San Francisco Chamber Singers examined this subject on Sunday with a beautifully sung program of lesser-known works elaborately entitled "Liberté! Voices of Hope--Music inspired by Picasso, his art and World War II" in the Florence Gould Theater at the Palace of the Legion of Honor.
The conductor, Robert Geary, selected a fascinating mix of twentieth-century works relating both to war and to the Legion of Honor's current
exhibit "Picasso: The War Years." The 21 Chamber Singers
performed this challenging program under Geary's direction with beautiful tone, exquisite attention to musical detail and consumate professionalism, all in the difficult and dry acoustic of the Gould Theater. They are a chamber choir of the first rank.
Francis Poulenc's "Un Soir de Neige" ("A Night of Snow," to four poems by Paul Eluard) are typical of his choral writing: lush chords, careful attention to texts, witty chromaticism throughout,and with triadic cadences at the end. The Chamber Singers were a bit too careful in their declamation of the difficult French texts, often at the expense of smooth-flowing phrases, but the tricky tuning was handled well. The wintry mood of poet and composer came across well.
Poulenc's "Liberté", the final movement of his "Figure Humaine,"
received a spirited reading as well, the Chamber Singers separating
into two groups to highlight the double chorus writing. This text, also by Eluard, is in the style of a litany, with verses flung back and forth from chorus to chorus with every-increasing intensity and abandon. Dedicated to Picasso, "Figure Humaine" was composed in secret and published "underground" so that it would be ready for the day of the liberation.
"Ceremony After a Fire Raid," a setting of a Dylan Thomas poem by the
Welshman William Mathias, received a thundering performance from the Chamber
Singers, who were energetically accompanied by pianist Sue Bohlin and
percussionists Allen Biggs and Mindy Whitacre. Mathias writes in a harsh and dry musical language, perhaps better fitting a description of an actual battle than of the funeral scene Thomas'poem describes. At climactic moments of the piece, Mathias asks the chorus to speak phrases of the text, which seems to diminish the impact of the words in relation to the music that surrounds them.
Though the Chamber Singers delivered the shouted texts with clarity and a good bit of tone color not often heard in choral speaking, it was ineffective. The final phrase, simply shouted in unison by the choir, brought the work to an anticlimactic and unsatisfying end.
Both words and music for "Picasso's Guitar" were written by a former member of the Chamber Singers, Kevin Raftery, in memory of a founding member of the group, Daryl Wagner. Though the work was written and first performed in 1986, the title if not the subject placed the work nicely into the context of the program. Raftery's text is really a love song rather than a reflection on war. The text was beautifully sung by a guest artist, baritone Stephen
Walsh, while the choir sang a warm, tonal vocalise as accompaniment.
The Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara is enjoying a great deal of
popularity nowadays, and the women of the Chamber Singers gave a touching
performance of his popular "Suite de Lorca," to four poems by the
great Spanish poet. The pieces are tonal, and each focuses on a particular musical element, such as the strumming of a guitar or a modal scale. The Chamber Singers' women sang with rich tone, well shaped phrases and musicality.
The program concluded with the premiere of a work written for the Chamber Singers by the Japanese-American composer Paul Chihara, music director for the Walt Disney Co. Like Andre Previn, Chihara has spent his career crossing back and forth over the ever-vanishing line that separates classical and popular music(including film and TV. "Minidoka (Reveries of...)" is a reflection on the composer's experiences as a small child in
the Japanese internment camp in Minidoka, Idaho. As Chihara explained in brief comments before the performance, the work has humorous elements, depicting the "adventure" of internment as only a four year old might have experienced it.
Chihara wrote both the text and the music, and he described the work as a
quodlibet, a humorous mixture of sometimes incongruous words and music. Typical of much of Chihara's choral music, there are quotations from a variety of musical sources, including Japanese and Chinese popular and folk songs as well as the American popular song "Way Beyond the Hills of Idaho." At one point in the work, one could even hear a recording of Dick Haymes singing a few phrases of the song, providing a subtle accompaniment for the Chamber Singers' delivery of Chihara's affecting piece.
For some reason, the Chamber Singers choose to perform with music stands, rather than simply to hold the music in their hands. This provided some comical choreographical moments of singers lifting and carrying stands around the stage as they changed positions for each piece. Not only did the stands separate the singers from the audience with a kind of metallic wall, but the fact that hands were free gave one particularly energetic alto ample opportunity to play with her jewelry, shade her eyes while scanning the audience and swing her arms from side to side in time with the music. It was an otherwise superb display of the choral art by Robert Geary and The San Francisco Chamber Singers.
(Frank Albinder, 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.)
©1998 Frank Albinder, all rights reserved |
Picasso's "Guitar"