San Francisco Classical Voice

May 28, 1999

Wise cooks say that to produce a wonderful banquet it's necessary to start with beautiful, fresh ingredients; to use great recipes prepared to perfection; and then to present it all in such an organized sequence that the diners find interest and satisfaction and excitement to the last morsel. Perfect concerts, like banquets, are rare. The San Jose Choral Project's final concert of the season (May 28th at Christ the Good Shepherd Lutheran Church in San Jose) almost achieved it.

Conductor Daniel Hughes has chosen twenty-nine youngish singers with good and flexible voices, working brains, and great ears -- singers who carry the line to the end of phrases and who know where these ends are. Hughes's musical ear has helped produce one of the better groups I've heard recently.

The title of their concert, "Sing Me to Heaven -- Songs of the Heart -- Songs of the Soul," was a clue to the expected audience. Twenty-seven short works were chosen to create the program -- mainly slowish pieces showing to advantage the group's excellent tone and control; a few with more motion; and many, many sweet ones sprinkled throughout the program. Lovely bonbons -- or rather, a smorgasbord -- but nothing representing the satisfying focus of an entree.

Between numbers, the group frequently and smoothly changed its physical formation. Some pieces required a double chorus, some divided sections, and some included paired sections for musical reasons (singers who did similar things stood together).

Only six pieces, Sweelinck's Hodie, Christus natus est, Debussy's Dieu! Qu'il a fait bon regarder, Johann Christoph Bach's Ich lasse dich nicht, Josquin Desprez' Tu pauperum refugium, "Rachmaninoff's Vespers #7, and Tchesnekoff's Salvation is Created,/i> (why in English while all these others were in their original languages?) were known to me, thus giving the exciting potential of twenty-one new music adventures.

I found the first pieces interesting from a different (and difficult) point of view -- a conductor's. Hughes's Debussy needed a more kinesthetic approach. I like the first chord "Dieu" - to be "thrown out" like a scarf hanging in the air rather than presented. The Rachmaninoff and Tchesnekoff lacked musical ideas (melodic content, contrasts and/or harmonic happenings, shape, points of arrival, etc.); both works depend instead on choral color, which didn't materialize.

The remaining pieces were often too alike, or had too many literal repetitions of melodic material. Morten Lauridsen's Contre Qui, Rose had a too-long exposition of meandering materials before a piano made a very delayed (compositional decision) entrance, only proving that the hot temperature caused by the large audience in this churches had caused some degradation in the group's usual good tuning. But marvelous tuning did occur elsewhere with some unusual intonation actually expressive as well as accurate.

I was happy to hear (for me) fresh spirituals, which the group did well, although here individual voices stuck out from the unified choral sound.

While Hughes's ear produces beautifully unified vowel tone by getting "the same vowel on the same pitch at the same time," the group still seemed to slight its diction. This defect might be cleared by focussing on the consonants in the marvelous way attention and timing were paid to the vowels. His care certainly paid off well in Ren Clausen's In Pace by producing a thrilling climax of sonority that I wish had been present in other pieces. (Program notes said absolutely nothing about the composers, not even dates.)

Hughes has an expressive, readable, and pertinent beat that by being (in general) undivided left the rhythmic impulse to the singers' own internal visceral reaction rather than being based on external conductor cues. Although the size of his beat appeared constant, the singers used a large dynamic range, producing impressive unified diminuendos with hardly any color change. There was very little of that hateful noticing how nice a (mechanical) job the performers were doing, when the audience realize they are no longer listening to the music but only admiring the performance.

Occasionally the sound seemed top-heavy. I would have liked a richer' bass tone with overtones giving sopranos more support, and altos with slightly more tension to match the tenors (when in similar registers) in the few contrapuntal textures presented.

The concert's configuration raised questions about program building and especially the need to avoid anticlimaxes. To me, the final offering "Sing Me to Heaven" was musically uninteresting and unexciting, a letdown and anticlimax in programming, but well received by this audience. All-in-all wonderful singing, good music making, even if not the most satisfying concert.

(Donald Aird is a composer, organist, and choral conductor.)

©1999 Donald Aird, all rights reserved