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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
August 12, 2005
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By Bruce Lamott
It's exciting to discover a new performance venue in the City, and to hear an ensemble best suited to it. Seventh Avenue Presbyterian Church is acoustically ideal for the intricacies of Renaissance polyphony, the stock-in-trade of the newly organized San Francisco Renaissance Voices, a mixed ensemble of twelve singers who debuted last October. Friday night they presented the second program of an ambitious five-year “Polyphony Project” of liturgical music from Spain, Burgundy, England, Flanders, and Italy, devoting one year per region. Music director Todd Jolly conducted Spanish music for the Feast of the Assumption of the Virgin, including Francisco Guerrero's Missa sancta et immaculata.
The program began with an evocation of the liturgical ambience of the music, the monastically robed choir entering to the ringing of handbells and placing flowers before images of the Virgin on a white satin altar. Unfortunately, the effect was more awkward than transcendent in the fully lighted room. (The Presbyterian patriarchs, Johns Calvin and Knox — Protestanism's virulent foes of the veneration of Mary — could be heard rolling in their respective graves.)
The well-chosen but perhaps too-challenging repertoire surveyed the work of the principal Spanish masters — Morales, Guerrero, Victoria, and Cabezón — as well as the lesser-known Alonso Lobo and Pedro de Cristo. Complex polyphonic lines interspersed with declamatory chordal passages were the order of the day. Guerrero's Ave virgo sanctissima featured angelic antiphonal effects in the treble parts, enhanced by the vibrant acoustic. Some of the best singing was heard in the work of uncredited soloists: Lobo's Ave regina coelorum was sensitively shaped and rhythmically secure. While the Crucifixus and Pleni trios of the Guerrero mass and the quartet of his Sancta Maria succurre miseris were well-matched vocally and stylistically, each came to grief in the rhythmically complex textures. Conductor Todd Jolly provided a solid tactus, but was kept busy rescuing missed entries.
There's a great deal of promise in this young ensemble; the upper parts have a fine sense of intonation and — left to themselves — created a harmonious and stable sonority. Many of the solo voices also showed good instincts for style. The women's sections brought a particular radiance to the Guerrero Kyrie. Unfortunately, this was too often undermined by persistent vibrato and reediness in the bass, giving one the feeling of listening under water. Even at cadences, the bass line was unstable and diffuse, distorting intonation and at odds with the tone color of the other sections — a bari sax in the midst of a recorder consort. It's commendable that a fresh new group is undertaking such an ambitious and musically fulfilling project as their “Polyphony Project.” But a better demonstration of the linear aspects of this music is prerequisite; in the give-and-take of these Renaissance lines, there was mostly “take” and very little “give.” The complex interplay of individual parts needs more dynamic contour — especially in the descent to cadences — and rhythmic surety is Job One. (If the Spanish are a rhythmic challenge, beware the Burgundians!) Bay Area audiences have a chance to watch this ensemble develop and mature in their ideal venue, just a half block off the N-Judah Muni line. It's a congenial and intimate performance environment which hosts a monthly concert series that's affordable and — if this sampling is typical — well worth hearing.
(Bruce Lamott is director of the Philharmonia Chorale and former choral director of the Carmel Bach Festival. He teaches music and Western Civilization at San Francisco University High School and is a visiting professor in music history at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.)
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