San Francisco Classical Voice

Peterson, a longtime professor at San Francisco State, set cummings' "now air is air," "who were so dark of heart," and "if up's the word," two of which featured elegant soprano solo passages. The music is modern without going over the cliff, its dissonance controlled over a discernibly tonal base. The expressive depths Peterson could find within cummings' rather aloof abstractions struck me as a remarkable feat of sheer craftsmanship. Not only was the text severe in meaning, but the subtle use of contrapuntal voice-leading was masterly. Peterson managed smoothly to blend elements of the 16th century madrigalists with the textures of the Bach Motets.

Garrop, who currently lives and teaches in Chicago, set three poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay, which made for an interesting set of contrasting views of love. The first, "Now by this moon," deals with a woman's longing for a man she can not attain. Next was an elegy for a dead lover, "Time does not bring relief." Her finale dealt with a sarcastically indifferent attitude toward love, "I shall forget you presently, my dear." Garrop employed little color tricks within her textures to highlight emotional elements, such as breathing sounds and moans of longing for the "moon" piece. By contrast, short staccato sounds were used for the pessimistic lover: "I would indeed that love were longer-lived; And oaths were not so brittle as they are ..." (The cycle was commissioned for Volti by Chuck and Joan Grant, and money well spent it was.)

Donald Crockett's two-sectioned Broken Charms went back to Elizabethan England for its texts: "Care-charmed Sleep," by Samuel Daniel, and composer-poet Thomas Campion's "Thrice Toss These Oaken Ashes in the Air." Whereas most of the other setting were quite syllabic — one note per syllable — Crockett took a more lyrical approach in these mildly contrapuntal modern settings. He also had the advantage of superior poetry, written for maximum eloquence, depicting attempts at magical solutions to problems of life: trying to calm the mind into sleep, then Campion's futile ritual to seduce a desired beloved.

That second failed charm boasts a list of grotesque objects that might make even Macbeth's witches cringe: poisonous weeds, screech-owl feathers, cypress gathered at a dead man's grave, a fairy round, and such. Without resorting to picture-painting in sound, Crockett captured the essence of the lyrics in beautifully smooth concoctions of mildly dissonant smoothness. The work struck me as well polished and as a moving experience.

Commissioned by Volti, Alan Fletcher's No More to Hide was the largest and most complex composition of the evening. A brief Biblical quotation both opened and closed the work, mirroring the use of chorals in Bach's cantatas. Between those came five secular poems, alternating between three by Emily Dickinson ("Title divine — is mine!", "I am ashamed — I hide," and "Mine — by the Right of the White Election!") and two from Walt Whitman ("Among the men and women the multitude" and "I dreamed in a dream I saw a city invincible ..."). For a piece described as a "wedding cantata," the music, like the choice of texts, is less festive than ruminative. The whole seemed a meditation on marriage, tradition, and the doubt of tradition, and it would be difficult not to discern the issue of same-sex marriage in the combination of words and music.

What came across into the hall was a surprisingly bland setting of serious poetry. That's especially disappointing considering that Fletcher studied with a number of progressive-minded composers, not least Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions. It brought back memories of Composition 101, where the teacher began by telling us, "I can't teach you to compose. No one can. What I can do is teach you how to organize your daydreams, but if you lack those, go into acting.” I think Fletcher's problem was that he spent too much time on the meaning of words, and not enough on purely musical aspects of his composition. That's a common problem with political-message art.

Alvin Singleton's Gospel, set to a text by Rita Dove, struck me as something from the early Romantic period, sentimentality of the most fundamental sort. What emerged from this ultra-conservative piece was little more than unrelenting clichés, dripping with commercial sweet. By comparison, Mendelssohn's oratorios sound positively avant-garde. I fear Singleton belongs to the Better-safe-than-sorry school, but alas, there is also "Nothing ventured, nothing gained."

One curious consistency in all these works was their tendency toward using the Big Dramatic Ending, even when it is at odds with the texts. A climax to full volume, usually in the highest registers, colored nearly all the individual settings. The one semi-exception occurred in Crockett's Broken Charms, but even he was not entirely free of the gesture.

Volti's performances sounded splendidly musical in all areas of consideration. It may well be the finest collection of chamber singers in the country — or, if it isn't, I have yet to encounter its equal. They're miraculous, a treasure of the local scene. The pity is that their season contains only two more programs: February 19, 20, and 25, and then, with the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra, a super-looking program May 19, 20, and 21. That last will contain Britten's Cantata Misericordium and Lachrymae (the latter for viola and orchestra), Andrew Imbrie's On the Beach at Night, and Open the Book of What Happened by Volti's resident composer Mark Winges.

(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer. He was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years was a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle, and previously was a reviewer for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.)