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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
November 7, 2004
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By Jules Langert
In their first concert of the 2004/2005 season, San Franciscoıs Volti
filled the rafters of St. Markıs Episcopal Church in Berkeley with song — much of it beautiful, sumptuous, and invigorating. It was a demanding program of nine works for unaccompanied chorus, lasting nearly two hours, which the
group presented with tonal richness, precision, and interpretive warmth.
Two new pieces commissioned by Volti were especially memorable and
appealing, as was a piece written a few years ago by Mark Winges, Volti's
longtime resident composer.
The most satisfying work of the afternoon was Alan Fletcher's setting
of Yeats' late poem, “The Fiddler of Dooney.” Its subtle blend of moods and
textures coupled with a propulsive rhythmic lilt seemed genuinely to embody
the poetıs buoyant fantasy, a rollicking parable in which St. Peter ushers
the Fiddler through the Pearly Gates well ahead of his priestly brethren.
Also deeply engrossing was Stacy Garropıs Sonnets of War and Mankind, using two poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay. These are part of a much larger cycle of Millayıs Sonnets, still in the process of composition.
In the first Sonnet, “See how these masses mill and swarm,” Garrop
captures Millayıs vivid imagery of death and destructiveness with surging,
impassioned counterpoint, creating a tumultuous landscape of sound. This
was the most exciting, dramatically charged work on the program. The second
Sonnet, “Epitaph for the Race of Man,” is set poignantly and reflectively as a
sobering elegy, a potent counterweight to the earlier piece.
Volti briefly shared the stage with Ancora, a youthful and expert female chorus based in Piedmont, their nineteen singers of roughly high-school age adept and experienced in performing new music. Ancora gave a dazzlingly secure, elegant reading of Winges' “The Moon Dance” (2001), a lively, inventive choral scherzo incorporating multiple texts in three languages, with some very tricky vocal writing and a transparent, effervescent texture that makes this one of Winges' most immediately attractive scores. The six remaining pieces were drawn from submissions to the College Music Societyıs National Conference, held in San Francisco. They are all by composers in their thirties and forties from around the country. Jason Bahrıs “Psaume I” began the concert, showing skill and imagination in its setting of the six-stanza French text, all built around a unifying four-note motivic cell. Though occasionally the musicıs expressive direction became sidetracked by the interplay of voices and sonorities, its overall effect was strong and convincing. Felicia Sandlerıs “The Waking” (2002) takes a well known poem by Theodore Roethke, exploring its tone of suffering ambivalence and existential confusion in a reflective, meditative setting. Her use of solo voices against massed choral harmonies helps to bring out the poemıs sense loneliness and uncertainty. The other pieces were plagued in various degrees by an excess of sostenuto writing. Though Volti sustains and blends its sonorities with great skill, a composerıs over-reliance on this technique is like holding the pianoıs damper pedal down for too long; the energy and meaning of the music start to drain away. In addition, St. Markıs over-resonant acoustics exaggerated the problem by consistently blurring the words and music in this kind of texture. David Heuser's "Clouds," N. Lincoln Hanks' "Tota Pulchra," and Philip Schroederıs "Lux Aeterna" (all composed in 1997) were affected by this syndrome, in need of something to enliven an often lush, but too static spectrum of sound. "Burning Chariots," by Lansing McCloskey (2003), shared in some of this bloated, becalmed quality, breaking out of it with only partial success. His text comprised Biblical passages in several languages, and the most compelling setting was of fragments from The Lamentations of Jeremiah, sung in Latin. Here soprano solos alternated with the full tenor section, accompanied throughout by the rest of the chorus. The solo parts were superbly sung and interpreted by Tonia d'Amelio, showing the high caliber of individual vocal and musical artistry that Volti contains within its ranks. These passages also represented McCloskeyıs finest vocal writing and showed remarkable ability at setting the text. In fact, this section was one of the concertıs musical highlights, right up there with the music of Fletcher and Garrop.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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