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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
San Francisco Renaissance Voices San Francisco Joyful Chinese Ensemble Todd Jolly January 13, 2007
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When Two Worlds Meet By Scott Edwards
It is a rare event to hear European and Chinese early music side by side, let alone to even guess what Chinese early music might have sounded like. But just such a program was put together by the San Francisco Renaissance Voices and the San Francisco Joyful Chinese Ensemble on Saturday in Berkeley.
Besides providing an appropriate concert in celebration of the Lunar New Year, the collaboration seems to have been inspired by a specific piece: the Messe des Jesuites a Pekin, written by the 17th century Jesuit composer Charles d’Ambleville. While d'Ambleville served as procureur of the Compagnie de Jésus at Rouen, France in the 1620s, little else is known of his life and no evidence suggests he ever spent time in China. Nonetheless, the Jesuits had already cultivated a decades-long presence in China by the mid-17th century. Given the Society’s well-known use of music in its missionary work, it would not be a surprise for this piece — and the several others included on the program — to have been performed in Jesuit religious services in China.
So how might such a religious service have proceeded? Todd Jolly, the music director of Renaissance Voices, decided to perform d'Ambleville’s Mass setting in alternatim fashion with traditional Chinese music. In other words, Chinese instruments took over the role that French, Italian, and Spanish services traditionally assigned to the organ during this period. The result brought these two musical cultures into close proximity, reinforcing the precarious nature of the general cultural encounter between Europe and China in the early modern period, and demonstrating how these musical traditions, placed side by side, could make the one sound so radically different in the context of the other.
The result was a series of unforeseen encounters throughout the concert, brought immediately to the foreground by an extremely theatrical opening sequence. When the lights first dimmed in Trinity Chapel, we were greeted not with the choral voices one usually expects in such a setting, but rather by two dancers, Jonathan Jiang and Gary Tang, beneath the canopy of an elaborate lion costume, performing a traditional Southern Lion Dance with percussion accompaniment. The colorful costume was matched by richly varied percussive sounds. The performers’ athletic precision was essential, especially if they were to navigate the narrow confines of the central aisle and the graded steps of the crossing with their limited visibility. Their dance was followed by a tolling gong that announced the procession of the singers to the stage, each of whom carried a red lantern while singing a song in Chinese simply titled “Happy New Year.” Once assembled on stage, oboist Nicholas Rastegar and organist Grace Renaud provided an instrumental transition from the spectacular opening to the first of a series of motets. Rastegar, a recent graduate of UC Berkeley’s music department, already has an accomplished sense of articulation, and it will be great to see his onstage confidence increase as he continues to perform. Before launching into d'Ambleville’s Mass, Renaissance Voices performed a series of brief sacred works by Jean Courtois, Francisco Guerrero, Michel-Richard de la Lande, Alessandro Costantini, and Tomás Luis de Victoria — a broad spectrum of composers, encompassing work from across the European continent and over multiple centuries. The variety was fitting, given the cosmopolitan nature of the Jesuits’ mission and their close affiliations with musicians wherever they went. Courtois’ four-voice Venite populi terrae was a suitable opener for the set, with its injunction to “all the earth’s peoples” to gather in witness to God’s works. While the text is a celebratory one, Jolly opted for a more reserved tempo, perhaps to clarify the vocal delivery and accentuate the carefully articulated structure of the music according to the verses. If the Courtois seemed rather slow, the following works were more unbridled in celebratory expression. The villancico by Guerrero and the motets by de la Lande and Costantini highlighted specific cross sections of the group. The Guerrero and Costantini showed off the polyphonic capabilities of the high voices, while de la Lande’s Cantate Domino emphasized the strength of the group’s low voices in assertive, homophonic writing. The final motet in the first half of the concert was Victoria’s elegant and unpretentious O quam gloriosum, a testament to the composer’s masterful motivic writing and an appropriate choice for the set, given Victoria’s position as the first maestro di cappella at one of the Jesuits' flagship Roman institutions, the Collegio Germanico.
Before the Victoria and after the Courtois, the San Francisco Joyful Chinese Ensemble provided interludes of traditional Chinese instrumental music in near-constant four-part polyphony. In one sense, this ensemble was a good counterpart to Renaissance Voices as another idea of how four-part polyphonic music might sound. Compared to the choir, the overall range of the instruments was higher-pitched, and the music was nearly always dense, complex, and fast-moving. The instrumentalists’ skills were unequivocal, as each musician played from memory and in deep concentration. A standout performance was given by Xiong Qi Ming, rising to his feet for a refined solo on the erhu, a two-stringed violin, made languid by his dancelike gestures and nods to the audience. His extraordinary showmanship was later highlighted in the second half of the concert by the flamboyant flutter-tonguing and pitch-bending of his solo on the dizi, a bamboo flute. Renaissance Voices performed d'Ambleville’s Mass after the intermission, with music from the Joyful Chinese Ensemble as antiphon substitutes. Although this setting of the Mass Ordinary was published in the mid-17th century, it would not have been too out of place in a late 16th century collection. Such a conservative approach to composition is perfectly in keeping with Jesuit musical ideals of continuous consonant harmonies and unobstructed textual delivery. This makes small gestures, such as the unexpected yet brief switch to the minor during the Benedictus on "Ecce panis" all the more poignant in what is ultimately a beautiful work. The more jarring harmonic moments were the alternations of Mass setting and traditional Chinese music, for which I had to keep readjusting my ears to two incompatible tuning systems. It was precisely such a musical dialogue with which the Jesuits must have been confronted everywhere they went, making these two different types of music such a fascinating experience in alternatim performance. Famous for their creativity in incorporating local practices into their worship, Jesuit missionaries in China undoubtedly would have invited local musicians to help make their services more palatable to non-Catholics, but certainly there would have been a lot of trial and error in the process. Conflicting tuning systems would have been only one issue among radically different approaches to musical practices and performance. This was brought most unfortunately to the foreground by a couple of instrumentalists, apparently unaware that their conversation could be heard in the nave during the choir's performance. This did not detract, however, from Renaissance Voices’ focused musical delivery. As a group, Renaissance Voices is a bit top-heavy due to an overly large soprano section, and it would be nice to hear the inner voices strengthened by equal numbers. Nonetheless, it is wonderful to have an amateur musical group tackle such a challenging repertory. They have come a long way since their first concerts a couple of years ago. Clearly, Jolly has a good sense of what his group can do, having selected music that shows off their strengths. Long may such imaginative programming continue.
(Scott Edwards is a Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley studying 16th and 17th century music.)
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Todd Jolly
