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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
February 23, 2004
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By David Bithell
The pair of concerts presented this past weekend by the San Francisco vocal ensemble Volti showcased a wide range of contemporary approaches to choral writing including two world premieres. Presenting the program with a committed sense of style and highly skilled technique, Volti, led by Artistic Director Robert Geary, has consistently married contemporary programming with great performances. A new project of the ensemble, the Choral Arts Laboratory, continues this tradition. Through yearly commissions of new works by young American composers, Volti works closely with the composers, giving readings of the work in progress and providing valuable feedback.
The first composer selected for the Choral Arts Laboratory project was Peter Knell, whose Tautology received its premiere this past weekend. Meant to resemble, in a loose fashion, the development of speech in children, the piece begins with a sustained gradual expansion of sung phonemes. The chorus clearly projected the overall sense of line and balance, though many of the extended techniques felt more as compositional add-ons rather than anything essential to the structure of the work. Similarly the sudden shift halfway through the piece to a hybrid form of swung classical scat, while clearly fun for the audience, made little developmental sense.
Two unexpected highlights of the evening were the opening pieces on each half of the concert: John Cage's Ear for EAR, which opened the first half, and Bobby McFerrin's The 23rd Psalm, from the second half. Both pieces embody a simplicity and clarity of focus that allowed the performers to give natural and internalized performances.
The liturgical feel of a call and response in Cage's composition produced a complex vocal texture out of very simple quasi-modal melodic materials. Following the melodic phrase of an “instigator,” members of the chorus respond in their own time, spread throughout the interior of the hall. This spatialization also allows for an individuation of vocal timbres, as certain members of the chorus are closer than others to any given member of the audience. This piece also addressed the context of the performance space, remarkably, without using a religious text (its premiere in 1983 was also in a church), instead using only the sounds “ee”, “ah”, and “err” (E-A-R) — an indication of Cage's belief in the sanctity of listening. Clarity and simplicity also appeared, in a different form, in Bobby McFerrin's 1990 setting of The 23rd Psalm. The straightforward homophonic setting and rich tonal harmonies allowed the singers really to show off their remarkable phrasing and tone. Three works by Los Angeles-based composer Paul Chihara highlighted the diversity of his compositional output and spanned the breadth of his career. Volti explored these pieces with three different sets of guest musicians. Magnificat, his first published work from 1967, was admirably performed by the ensemble Ancora, a young women's chorus based in Piedmont. The dense harmonies resolved through a gradual thinning out of the overall texture allowing linear motion to take the place of traditional tonality. While the dynamic range was a little narrow, the spirit and intensity of the piece was delivered with confidence.
Composed in 1973, Chihara's Lie Lightly, Gentle Earth received a very rounded performance, delicate and full bodied. Volti was joined by students from the 2004 Choral Institute for High School Singers — a program that provides concentrated professional training from Volti singers and Artistic Director Robert Geary for approximately 100 students annually. The third piece by Chihara was the world premiere of a revised version of Songs of Love and Loss, commissioned by Volti. Inspired by the composer's relationship with San Francisco Symphony Principal Violist Geraldine Walther and Volti conductor Robert Geary, and modeled in part on Brahms's Two Songs for voice, viola, and piano, the set of three songs intertwined chorus with solo viola. Overall, the piece was well performed, bringing out the romantic spirit of the work. Some problems of matching between voices and viola occurred in the performance. The chorus masked the viola in some of the louder sections, and the vibrato of the viola was at times too deep for the singers. The evening's program was rounded out with performances of Carol Barnett's The Last Invocation and Tamar Diesendruck's elegant set of miniatures, The Mystery (a Volti commission from 2002). With eight works composed between 1967 and 2003, Volti has shown a commitment to new music for chorus. While few pieces were truly experimental (questioning the tradition of choral writing and, thereby, worthy of “Laboratory” treatment), the works presented were generally well crafted and performed with great integrity.
(David Bithell is a composer/performer based in the East Bay whose work explores the connections between music, theater, and language. He is co-director of the sfSoundSeries.)
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