San Francisco Classical Voice

Let the record show that Vance George made a wrong entrance.

The chorus director of the San Francisco Symphony, presiding over a "Festival of Choirs" Sunday afternoon in Davies Hall, did everything right — just as he has through a 19-year-long string of successes, from brilliant Ives performances to Mahler to Elgar to Verdi — but here he was, entering the stage and finding the audience and all the singers on stage sitting and waiting for Mark Bruce at the organ to begin a performance of the Toccata from Widor's Symphony No. 5.

George stopped at the organ, located right at the entrance, and exchanged a few words, sotto voce, with Bruce. The organist reached for his program and showed George that it was, indeed, his turn. George motioned to Bruce, somewhat embarrassed but very graciously, and withdrew to await his turn.

The episode was funny, but also somewhat poignant because chorus directors habitually labor in the shadow of music directors, and however good the relationship may be between George and Michael Tilson Thomas, it is unusual for the former to run a whole concert.

In fact, it happens only a couple of times a year that George and the 30-year-old SFS Chorus have Davies Hall to themselves for all-choral concerts. On this Sunday, the resident chorus shared the stage with young singers from around the Bay, turning the event into something unusual, big and important.

One may wonder if the "Festival of Choirs" label is not too grandiose for a single concert, but the music produced by some 300 (mostly young) voices qualified the event to be called "festive," at the very least. Impressive, delightful and splendid are some of the other adjectives that spring to mind.

Select high school choruses from Napa, Hayward, Piedmont and San Ramon joined the SFS Chorus in joint performances as well as strutting their own stuff.

With a hall full of proud parents and relatives, popping flashbulbs before (but not during) the concert, George began the program with a Mormon-Tabernacle-sized performance of Vaughan Williams's O Clap Your Hands, the sound filling and stretching Davies' oversized hull of nearly 1 million cubic feet, but still containing the music — the result was "big," but not noisy.

Volume and mood shifted immediately with Byrd's Ave verum corpus, the massed choirs singing quietly and majestically. The performance of Gabrieli's In ecclesiis featured soloists placed around the hall: mezzo Virginia Gnesa Chen, tenor J. Wingate Greathouse, baritones Steven Rogino and Chad Runyon.

After the rafter-shaking Widor, and George's personable and effective "rehearsal" of the audience for the program-closing Vaughan Williams The Old Hundredth Psalm Tune, came the largest, most ambitious work on the program: the Bruckner Mass in E minor.

Thirty select singers from each school joined the 100-voice SFS Chorus in a performance that began and ended spectacularly well, but bogged down in the middle. There, almost as a resting point, the music sounded curiously mannered, un-impassioned. Picking up with the Sanctus and then peaking with the very brief Benedictus, Osanna and Agnus Dei sections, George brought the work to an impressive conclusion. A chamber orchestra, consisting of SFS woodwinds and brass, gave all the works in the first half solid support.

The generous and varied program continued in the second half with combined choruses performing traditional Czech songs (with Mina Kanaridis and Steven Rogino, soloists; Marc Shapiro, piano), works by Charles Villers Stanford, Bach and Moses Hogan, but this was also the opportunity for individual turns.

Conducted by Ken Rawdon, the Mt. Eden High School Chamber Chorale of Hayward sang Eric Whitacre's With a Lily in Your Hand; the Napa High School Chamber Choir offered Morton Lauridsen's O Magnum Mysterium, under the direction of Travis Rogers. Joseph Piazza's Piedmont High School A Cappella Choir sang a work in Polish by Tadeusz Szeligowski; and the San Ramon Valley High School Concert Choir, under Ken Abrams' direction, performed Mendelssohn's Richte mich, Gott, in Kenneth Jennings' arrangement.

(Janos Gereben, a regular contributor to www.sfcv.org, is arts editor of the Post Newspaper Group. His e-mail address is janos451@earthlink.net.)

©2002 Janos Gereben, all rights reserved