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CHORAL MUSIC REVIEW
March 2, 2007
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Waving the Contemporary Music Flag By Heuwell Tircuit
Singing the unsung composer has long been a basic motivation for the Volti chamber choir. That was certainly the mode of Friday evening’s concert in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church. Director Robert Geary led the dedicated group through eight works by seven different, rarely heard, contemporary composers. Naturally, there were hits and misses, but the program offered a refreshing survey of music that Volti has commissioned or championed.
Geary opened with Elliot Gyger’s Rezo de San Inigo de Loyola (“Prayer of St. Ignatius Loyola,” 1990), and closed with his Qumi ‘ori (2004). The first half also featured Kevin Raftery’s Ribblesdale (2004), Toon Vandevorst’s Phoenix Songs, Op. 28 (2006), and Amy Beth Kirsten’s In the Black (2006). Two of Martha Sullivan’s Four Shakespeare Songs (2005) opened the second part of the concert, followed by N. Lincoln Hanks’ Driftwood (2005), and Cindy Cox’s Only one great thing sings me when I am mindful (2006), before the second Gyger piece.
All of these composers are choral singers themselves, and indeed, Raftery and Vandevorst were once members of this choir. There were no premieres, but that only made the concert more important, since new works are all too rarely repeated in today’s musical world.
Gyger was educated in his native Australia before his advance studies at Harvard, where he now holds an assistant professorship. Perhaps that accounts for his use of foreign languages in his works, which he carried to extremes. His Rezo de San Inigo was commissioned to celebrate the 450th anniversary of the founding of the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits. This obviously meant using a prayer by the order’s founder, St, Ignatius. Admitting that he was torn between the original Spanish and an English translation, he used both.
Qumi,’ori, from Isaiah 60: 1-3, goes even further, using Latin, Hebrew and English versions superimposed on one another. I doubt that anyone except God could follow the words as they were being sung, which just might be Gyger’s purpose. Both compositions are essentially tonal, while including occasional genuflections toward cluster harmony. But for all its academic propriety, the piece struck me as unmemorable. Neither Gyger work was at all shocking or unpleasant, merely inoffensive. Raftery’s Ribblesdale, on the other hand, struck me as the most absorbing music of the evening. Trained at UC Santa Barbara, Raftery now lives and sings in London with the Holst Singers and New London Chamber Choir. He set a 19th-century poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, partly using words from regional dialects. Raftery clearly is in touch with the styles developed over the past 50 years. He employs chantlike passages over long sustained tones, plus some layered textures along the lines of Lutoslawski or Ligeti, but without delving into their fondness for thick sonorities. The final effect proved dramatically effective, addressing an ecological concern for nature. Vandevorst, Dutch trained but now a U.S. resident, set three terse poems by his wife, Alice. Vocally idiomatic, they featured a keen feeling for vocal sonority, which meant greater clarity for the words than in other works on the program. Commissioned by Volti, they were money well spent, and music worth additional exposure. Vandevorst drew the best laugh of the evening. When asked to make a few introductory remarks, he largely devoted them to praise of Volti. Then, without thinking, he let slip, “They’re singers, but they’re intelligent people.” Even the choir got a good laugh out of that.
Kirsten’s In the Black won Volti’s pacesetting Choral Arts Laboratory prize. The selected piece is tried out by Volti in front of the composer, who is then allowed time to tinker with it and polish it. Although largely concerned with night, In the Black is hardly a nocturne. It avoids cliches through an acute sense of modern idioms and a firm grasp of vocal techniques. The concept is that words are repeated so as to form contrapuntal layers. Overall, Kirsten’s acoustical experiments formed the most singularly original event of the evening. Surprisingly, she is still pursuing postgraduate composition studies in Baltimore. Sullivan’s Shakespeare settings, Under the Greenwood Tree, and It was a Lover and His Lass, were easily the most traditional-sounding music of the evening, but nevertheless quite lovely in their gentility. They are pretty, in a folksy, lullabylike way. Unfortunately, her setting of It Was a Lover is doomed to suffer comparison with that by Shakespeare’s contemporary, Robert Morley — one of the most famous Shakespeare settings of its time. Hanks went for a more overtly contrapuntal setting in his Driftwood, after a poem by Witter Bynner. It’s a lovely meditative poem, although I could hardly pick out the words amid the clutter. Cox, a member of the UC Berkeley faculty, tried to get too much into her piece, from Tibetan throat singing to rap and most everything in between. Her title formed the entire text of the piece, both in English and its original Buddhist/Hindu mantra form. The end result failed to add up to much more than a hodgepodge, and lacked any serious point of view. What saved all these pieces was the sterling vocalism of Volti, and the fine musicianship of all concerned, not least Director Geary, whose generosity was broad enough to turn over one piece to Assistant Conductor Nathaniel Berman, also an accomplished professional. If not all the music was top notch, still the end result proved utterly adventurous, and that’s what Volti is all about.
(Heuwell Tircuit is a composer, performer, and writer who was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle. He wrote previously for Chicago's American and the Asahi Evening News.)
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