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CONTEMPORARY MUSIC REVIEW
April 23, 2004
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By Jules Langert
Volti celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary this season. At their first concert in 1979, Bach's Christmas Oratorio was featured, but they have since beecome a leading ensemble in the performance of contemporary and new music, winning several annual awards from ASCAP and Chorus America for their innovative and adventurous programs. We are lucky to have them here, especially at a time when choral groups, like opera companies, look far more eagerly backward than to their own time when searching for something new and different to perform.
For its spring concert, heard Friday at St. John's Presbyterian Church, Berkeley, Volti, the former San Francisco Chamber Singers, chose music by three Bay Area composers who have had strong ties to the ensemble. The late Alexander Post was a friend and benefactor who wrote several pieces for them. This Is the Garden (1991), to an early, romantically lush poem by e. e. cummings, is a fine and eloquent example. Post's fluent, expressive choral writing brings musical life to cummings' central image of the garden as a metaphysical landscape, a timeless Eden of mysterious beauty. Mostly homophonic vocal textures change and intensify their mood with each poetic reference to the garden and what it contains. A small instrumental component of woodwinds, strings, harp, and percussion fills out the sound and adds its own luminous aura. The performance by Volti and members of the Left Coast Ensemble led by Robert Geary was resonant and deeply satisfying; a memorable achievement on all counts.
Mark Winges has been resident composer with Volti for fifteen years, creating a body of interesting and demanding works whose inventive, experimental nature has consistently challenged the group. On this concert, Winges' Image and Motion: A Choral Symphony (1997-2001) was given its first performance. In a 30-minute setting of two poems by Bravig Imbs (“All was in flight” and “Sleep”), Winges has composed two dynamic scherzos alternating with two slower, denser, more contemplative movements. The chorus is joined by a sizable chamber contingent of strings, woodwinds, and percussion, with voices and instruments in a constantly evolving dialogue. The result is a colorfully intricate web of sound continually in flux, which in this performance led to some serious problems of balance and audibility for Volti's nineteen singers.
Winges' piece may require additional rehearsals and performances before the players, singers, and conductor can project a clear sense of its overall texture and pacing, and how things should fit together. Moving the singers forward with the instruments flanking them might help deliver the vocal sound more clearly; perhaps Winges will want to make some adjustments as well. The fact that Geary had to stop and restart two of the movements in order to avoid impending chaos shows that things were somewhat unsettled. I hope that Volti will reprogram the work in a year or two as they have done with other commissioned pieces. Though what we heard was often fascinating and stimulating, the composer and his music deserve a steadier, more seasoned rendition before any assessment of the score can be made. Kirke Mechem's Wildly Winging for a cappella chorus was the final composition, setting poems by Sara Teasdale, Paul Dunbar, and Siegfried Sassoon, all of them about birds and singing. Mechem begins his triptych with an attractive and pensively lyrical version of Teasdale's “Birds at Dusk,” as various cries and birdcalls well up in the chorus to accompany the lines of poetry. Dunbar's “The Caged Bird” is a deeply personal poem of protest and a plea for freedom from bondage. Mechem sets it with energy, but vitiates some of its power and directness by overemphasizing dynamic contrasts and textural refinements, directing our attention to the sensuous choral sound rather than to the poem's expressive thrust. He also tends to soften and prettify cadence points by bringing them smoothly to a close on a major or minor chord. Sassoon's “Everyone Sang” is a rapturous paean to flight and freedom and song, which Mechem sets exuberantly with extended vocalises reminiscent of the Renaissance English madrigalists. But there is also anxiety behind Sassoon's rapture and an undercurrent of mystery and wonder in the poetry that may reflect the poet's recent war experiences. Here Mechem relies on a few sudden changes of tempo, registration, and dynamics that seem more like devices or effects than an expressive engagement with the implications of Sassoon's poem. Mechem's settings have a keen sense of choral sound and vocal color, with clear, clean textures and considerable surface charm. Volti gave Winging Wildly a superb performance, and the piece is represented on their new CD along with several other compositions they have performed in recent years. The CD is entitled Volti Live, singing without a net, and it is available at P.O. Box 15576, San Francisco 94115. The web address is www.voltisf.org. It could be the perfect gift for the right person.
(Jules Langert is a composer and teacher who resides in the East Bay.)
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Mark Winges