The Choral Society’s performance is its third offering in “A Season for Peace,” works commenting on war and, transparently, opposing the continuation of U.S. military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The group is clearly concerned that we be attuned to the message, which is featured prominently in the program, even on the title page. That message is nothing less than the immorality and horror of war.

In the War Requiem, composed for the consecration ceremony of the new Coventry Cathedral in 1962, Britten sets the text of the Latin Mass for the Dead, interspersed with scathing poems by the World War I soldier Wilfred Owen. In a poem directed at the German “Big Bertha” gun, and placed by Britten in the middle of the Dies Irae section, Owen writes, “Reach at that arrogance which needs thy harm/And beat it down before its sins grow worse.” The poet suggests that there may be no folly too great for humanity to take up, and that, unexpectedly, the positive result to be gained from the huge gun is that its terror may cool our ardor for more violence.

The Owens poems do more work in this piece than simply excoriate war, the generals and politicians, and false patriotism. They also offer Britten the opportunity to make a personal commentary on the canonical texts themselves. Even the choral amens in the piece are unsettled, questing upward through the tritone interval that structures the entire work, as if asking a question. And the final Requiescant in Pace (May they rest in peace) is intertwined with the tenor and baritone soloists, as soldiers who have killed each other in battle, singing “Let us sleep now,” a provisional peace based in irony: Sharing death, the soldiers recognize their common humanity.

Throughout this piece, Britten pushes deeply into the meaning of the Latin Mass texts with tensely lyrical, often dissonant music. The War Requiem offers little by way of consolation, but it is fiercely original and unbelievably moving, especially in a strong performance.

Music on a Mission

Perhaps a sense of mission lent this performance its sense of urgency. Geary took a straight line through the piece, with more or less the standard tempos. He imparted a unanimity of purpose to his disparate forces that you could hear in the carefully calibrated dynamics and the cooperation between the various groups.

The large chorus handled the score’s complexities admirably. It was not thrown by the heterophonic parts of the Sanctus movement, where eight voice parts chant the words, but slightly offset from each other, in different time spans. The gradual buildup of this section was one of the great successes for the chorus. Of course, there were also moments (as in the Recordare section) when more-distinct entrances and more-forward consonants would have been welcome, and other places where the choral sound was a bit fuzzy. On the whole, though, the chorus triumphed.

The children’s choir, conducted in this performance by Clifton Massey, was nearly flawless. Intonation was perfect, as were enunciation and the blend of voices. The children were a little tentative occasionally, but otherwise immaculate performers.

Tenor Brian Thorsett and baritone Ken Goodson were a well-matched pair in the war poetry. Thorsett’s voice lacks the heroic ring of Peter Pears’, who debuted the work, but he has similar rock-solid control of his break, and is a tremendously expressive singer. I particularly liked the varied use of vibrato in his singing. Goodson has a similar timbre at the upper end of his range but with more vibrato. He also sings beautifully, with attention to the meaning of the words. The two singers displayed great accuracy throughout. Marcelle Dronkers gave a full-voiced account of the soprano part, setting us back in our seats with her Rex Tremendae Majestatis (King of tremendous majesty).

The orchestra played exceptionally well. Predictably, the string section was too small, but the players were terrific. The program roster listed some of the best available musicians in the Bay Area. No wonder the exposed instrumental parts came off so smoothly.

It is wonderful for the Choral Society — and other local choral groups, which have been doing the same thing — to use music to address their community and fellow citizens on important subjects. Britten would have loved this performance for just that reason, even beyond its general excellence. But we should remember that Britten’s pacifism was a moral stance that did not admit exceptions. If we are to take the Requiem’s message seriously, we have to ask how far our own pacifism extends.

Bloch, although grandson of a cantor, knew little Hebrew, so with help from Emanu-El’s cantor, Reuben Rinder, he studied the meaning of the Sabbath morning service word by word, abridging and editing it, and internalizing the prayers until they became for him the text that he had been searching his whole life to set. The result became, as far as I know, the first Jewish liturgical work by a major classical composer. Other composers such as Darius Milhaud and Paul Ben-Haim have since contributed to the genre.

Sacred Service is a fairly large work, in five movements lasting close to an hour. It has a dark, brooding quality but also encompasses drama and passion, reflecting the emotion of the text’s praise of God, although not in an over-specific sense. There are strange dissonances even in the most ecstatic passages. It might be considered premonitory of the sufferings of the Holocaust, although Bloch said in 1934 that he didn’t believe Hitler’s anti-Semitism was particularly significant or out of the ordinary.

Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)

The work is scored for a cantor (baritone soloist), a four-part chorus, and a large orchestra. I’m not sure how Bloch intended to get all these players in the tight quarters of the front of Emanu-El, which, after all, is a synagogue and not a theater. Regardless of that, however, the Emanu-El sanctuary — a huge, bright, airy, square-shaped marble-and-stucco vault in the style of Mediterranean synagogues — was a beautiful and resonant space for the music.

In this performance, both for budgetary and space reasons, the orchestra was cut down severely on the strings to allow full weight to the triple wind and brass sections. The chorus, however, was large, consisting of a hundred singers, many from four local Reform synagogues (Emanu-El, Temple Sinai in Oakland, Temple Isaiah in Lafayette, and Congregation B’nai Tikvah in Walnut Creek), plus the chorus of Temple Emanu-El of Dallas, which was here on tour, as well as members of the chorus of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley and the San Francisco Lyric Chorus.

As for the cantor, since the concert was held in conjunction with the convention of the American Conference of Cantors, there was a plethora of worthy candidates. No reason not to share the wealth, so the solo part was split among seven of them, all with congregational responsibilities: Robert Abelson (New York City), Erik Contzius (Elkins Park, Pennsylvania), David Goldstein (Glencoe, Illinois), Jonathan Grant (Newport Beach), Richard Cohn (Dallas), Mark Childs (Santa Barbara), and Gershon Silins (Toronto).

Intimate Knowledge of the Content

Even if you’ve never attended a Jewish religious service, you may have heard a cantor, because many cantors, including all these men, also appear on stage in opera, musical theater, or concert performances. At least three of our seven soloists have performed the Sacred Service in concert before. The music is Bloch’s own — he employs only one traditional cantorial melody, although his modal music bears strong stylistic resemblances to traditional Jewish music — but all the soloists approached their work as cantors rather than as concert singers. They knew the prayers intimately, of course, as reflected in the fact that, while Bloch’s transliteration uses the Ashkenazic dialect of Hebrew, the cantors sang in the more Sephardic pronunciation that is universal in synagogues today.

Each had a distinctive individual style, embodying the varieties of cantorial practice. Cantors Abelson and Goldstein were the most traditionally cantorial, Goldstein in particular employing irregular vocal movement, bending of notes, and a strong, wide vibrato. Cantors Contzius and Childs had firm, powerful voices and were more restrained in their embellishments. Cantors Cohn and Grant had lighter voices, Cohn’s being the sweetest with the most regular vibrato, and Grant’s being rather nasal with trills and a more operatic approach.

To Cantor Silins fell the responsibility of performing the Adoration and pre-Kaddish prayer, the only portions of the text in English. (The Kaddish itself, the mourners’ prayer, is not included in this work, although Leonard Bernstein added it in his recording.) Bloch directs that this section be spoken on pitch. Bernstein had a rabbi speak it without specified pitch. Cantor Silins chose to sing it outright in his deep and lyrical voice.

Although I’d just come from an evening worship service with a congregation consisting almost entirely of cantors — producing an astonishing sound in the audience responses — the chorus in the Sacred Service held up fairly well by comparison, echoing the cantor or going off on flights of its own, only occasionally faltering slightly, and being rich and full enough to ride over the reduced orchestra. The Golden Gate Festival Orchestra, as it was dubbed, consisted mainly of musicians from the little-known and underrated Fremont Symphony. This, too, was a strong ensemble, with cultivated wind solos and brass that resounded without blaring.

Gehrke, the choir director and organist at the temple, has conducted this work before, and led the performance with confidence. There were no slack passages, nor disconnections when one cantor was replaced by another in the course of a movement. Bloch intended a work of universal appeal to humanity. This was a performance that could be appreciated by anyone with an interest in sacred concert music.

Choral singing in the 19th century, however, developed as a large participatory cultural activity. It was held in such esteem that it would be best to speak of choral music as a normalizing activity, and quite conservative. In America, we see remnants of this age. The largest American musical organizations in the 19th century were the Handel and Haydn Society, followed by Philadelphia’s Mendelssohn Society, and the Cincinnati May choral festival, all the largest musical gatherings of their day.

And then, of course, there is the music. Can music be gay? Some reputable musicologists have tied themselves in knots trying to read a queer literary theory to music, an art to which any literary theory is often poorly suited. That said, I think it would be hard for modern evangelists of culture to point to standard art music repertory and decry it as: “This music is (1) White, (2) Male, and (3) Proper.” Such a claim lacks historical legitimacy, even if the face-value assertion is utterly true. (My thanks to Dean Alan Jones of San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral for tightening my thoughts on this matter.)

Yet we can refer to the body of, say, African-American spirituals and say this music is “black.” There is a struggle and identity to the music, but I would go further to suggest a basic authenticity.

Golden Gate Men’s Chorus

As an official event of San Francisco’s Gay Pride celebration this week, the Golden Gate Men’s Chorus, under the direction of Joseph Jennings, presented a concert Sunday evening on themes of homosexual love — by extension, a concert of gay music. GGMC is one of over 200 gay choruses in the United States, as estimated by the Gay and Lesbian Allied Choruses Association (GALA), the national service organization for such choruses.

Making a Statement

By performing at all (even show and pop repertory generally outside of this journal’s aesthetic), a gay men’s chorus makes a statement: by adopting conservative means to publicly proclaim one’s identity when it is acceptable to disparage, exclude, and hate that identity in many educated and respectable circles and institutions in this country, and have it be criminalized in most of the world.

The sound of a good men’s chorus is always thrilling, and Jennings’ singers sounded exceptionally good, offering a highly blended and consistently well-tuned tone. I never felt Jennings was pushing the limits of his volunteer singers, and they met the challenge of quite advanced repertory. If I felt any consistent room for improvement, it would have been better care with vowel purity; American diphthongs were especially distracting in the mostly Latin first half.

New works for choir are often out of touch with compositional trends for other mediums. GGMC offered Latin works by Lithuanian composer Vytautas Miskinis and Southern Californian David Montoya on the first half, alongside the arrangements for men’s choir of standard choral works by Louis Lewandowski and Samuel Barber. Both Miskinis’ and Montoya’s works, although crafted and beautiful, built on popular choral techniques of close-knit harmonies and aleatoric gimmicks. Montoya’s Little Mass for Men’s Voices welcomed the pure-voiced contributions of countertenor soloist Shawn-Lin Dzeng.

Much better was the premiere of Steven Sametz’ cycle We Two, to poems of Walt Whitman, which opened the second half. Sametz, a professor at Lehigh University, is one of America’s most respected choral composers. Whitman’s text is rather dense and sensual, and Sametz had quite a challenge bringing musical illumination to the meaning. I felt Sametz’ personal harmonic vocabulary set an appropriate mood for the texts, and the overall cycle was dignified and moving. It was the best music on the concert, and worthy of wider performance.

The main news of the evening was the premiere of David del Tredici’s Queer Hosannas, a cycle of three weighty choral works for men’s chorus and virtuosic piano four hands (played here, excitingly and sensitively, by Alex Lu and Keisuke Nakagoshi). In recent years, del Tredici, a composer of international repute across many mediums, has made something of a cottage industry for himself composing works speaking for the gay experience, which he describes as “until recently … virtually invisible in the world of classical music.”

Music Out of Its Time

My first reaction to del Tredici’s cycle was to check my calendar. Was this written in the 21st century? Although the new choral works from the first half may have slanted toward the romantic and lush, they were at least of our own time. Tredici’s choral work went on for minutes on end, indistinguishable from a Strauss melodrama. Piano four hands? How Fanny Mendelssohn! I kept scratching my head trying to figure out which Liszt menagerie was being quoted at the end of the first work, “Whitmansexual.”

If there was a coded message to this Romanticism (”neo” doesn’t apply here), I could not find it. Composers often reference and quote the musical materials of the past, either mysteriously (Shostakovich’s frequent quotation of famous themes comes to mind) or through stylistic updates (Britten’s neo-Tudor works). I felt del Tredici just slapped random poetry from A Different Light Bookstore onto Strauss’ Enoch Arden.

The composer showed an even more disturbing problem, and it’s one that I’ve noticed in other works of his (most notably his bad song cycle Gay Life, premiered at the San Francisco Symphony in 2001). Generally, when setting text, he runs out of verse before the music is over, and has no solution but to go back to some place and repeat. This is a fine enough technique if the climax of a text is at the end, but here it was a pacing problem.

Finally, del Tredici jinxes future performances by introducing a mini mariachi-band in the cycle’s conclusion, “Carioca Boy!” (a paean to a swarthy, sexy Brazilian). Suddenly, the wholly unnecessary percussion ensemble makes the work three times more expensive to perform. Otherwise, this tuneful, Latin-infused finale was toe-tappingly enjoyable, the choral equivalent of Gershwin’s naively popular Danzon Cubano: karaoke boy.

I hope that someday pride celebrations will go the way of St. Patrick’s Day parades — celebratory artifacts of a struggle essentially over. A nonexplicitly gay ensemble, however, might feel squeamish performing the composed “out” man-on-man orgasm concluding “Then and Yes,” the second of del Tredici’s Queer Hosannas. Yet such an ensemble could easily tackle the subtly gay themes of, say, Britten’s opera Death in Venice. I suspect such squeamishness comes from discomfort surrounding sexuality rather than homosexuality.

Herein lies the problem: Tredici, in all his Victorian frillery and decadence, seems out of touch. He speaks another’s musical voice while speaking for others. This is stock multiculturalism: musical Warhol.

This program repeats Tuesday, June 24, at 8 p.m. at the recital hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, 50 Oak Street.

The New Harvard Dictionary of Music defines schola cantorum as “A choir that performs Gregorian chant.” A 19th-century French institution founded by composer Vincent d’Indy took up the title to revive the art of plainchant and to “instruct” (not perform) in church music and counterpoint. Sunday’s affair at San Francisco’s St. Luke’s Episcopal church celebrated the 10th anniversary of a curious but highly regarded local institution, the Schola Cantorum of San Francisco. I say “curious” because of the group’s unlikely genesis: a church choir without a church.

Schola Cantorum

First, some background. In 1949, Joseph Jungmann, an Austrian Jesuit, wrote a study of the Roman Catholic liturgy so influential that it was rumored to lie on Pope Pius XII’s desk throughout the 1950s. According to Jungmann, the ascendancy of the church to political and cultural dominance of Europe led to:

a situation where at our divine services every sharp boundary between church and world is broken down, so that Jew and heathen can press right up to the steps of the altar and can stand in the very midst of the faithful at the most sacred moment.

Jungmann advocated a congregation modeled after the secret societies of early Christians, whose mob passivity Catholics of today will “substantially and actively overcome whenever and insofar as they take up a more active role.” The congregation is passive, in part, because music and liturgy was “the art-function of a small group.”

This was a principle that lay behind many of the liturgical and musical reforms of the 1960s’ Second Vatican Council. Although there are certain exceptions, in America, congregations instituted the reforms by casting aside a thousand years of cultivated repertory in favor of guitar-based folk ensembles. As if to emphasize the discontinuity with musical tradition, congregational music appeared in “missalettes”: small, cheaply printed prayer books meant to be discarded quarterly — quite literally, “throw-out music.” (A good discussion of the challenges encountered by Roman Catholic music programs can be found in the polemic “Why Catholics Can’t Sing” by Thomas Day; the book bears the subtitle The Culture of Catholicism and the Triumph of Bad Taste.)

A Star Is Born in the West

In 1998, the San Francisco Archdiocese converted an old vacant church in North Beach to a “shrine,” to exhibit some supposed remains of St. Francis of Assisi. It invited choral director John Renke to create a dignified traditional music program involving a professional choir. This ensemble, the Schola Cantorum, quickly became one of the most respected liturgical choirs in the United States, and it attracted a cohort of devoted patrons.

Regrettably, tensions developed between the musicians and the clergy, in part because the practice was so disconnected from the Catholic mainstream. Recriminations escalated on both sides, and in 2005, the entire music program was shut out. The church literally changed the locks, and misalletes appeared in the pews.

Yet the choir, backed by faithful patrons, survived, and it reformed itself into a hybrid: a liturgical and a concert choir. Over the past few years, the liturgical function has gradually waned. Sunday’s audience found a professional, secular 13-voiced choir, devoid of its liturgical vestments. Singer Jay Moorehead prepared the singers, whom he loosely directed from the side.

A Litany of Beauty

This ensemble is ideally suited to Renaissance polyphony. Happily, the first half of the concert featured an excellent, pitch-perfect performance of Josquin’s Missa pange lingua, as well as flawless readings of motets by English composers Gibbons, Byrd, and Robert Parsons. Although Josquin’s Mass was especially suited to the recent feast day of Corpus Christi, the remaining programming lacked a coherent narrative, flitting from one short motet to another.

Anchoring the Schola’s sound is the warm, yet vibratoless tone of the choir’s four sopranos. The remaining voices tended to accompany these exquisite sopranos, which made for good effect in a work such as Messiaen’s subtly difficult short motet O sacrum convivium. A successful performance of this work requires the sopranos to imitate old electronic instruments such as the ondes martenot or the theremin, which these sopranos accomplished without effort or fuss.

The choir was less successful where repertory demanded versatility. Bruckner’s Os justi is quite rightly one of the finest short cathedral works ever composed. Although Schola’s approach was very beautiful, it requires, in my mind’s eye, a slightly fuller Romantic sound. Likewise, I thought the short Poulenc anthem for men’s voices, Seigneur, je vous en prie, lacked heft. The Schola replaced Poulenc’s top tenor line with falsettists — far too saccharine an effect.

For me, the Schola’s transformation into a concert ensemble was confirmed in its performance of Nicolas Gombert’s Magnificat tertii/Octavi toni. The Magnificat canticle is performed at weekly vespers, and liturgical choirs know this text intimately. At the words “He hath showed strength with his arm” (Fecit potentiam), countless Renaissance composers pour out correspondingly strong music. Gombert, tightening the harmony with his characteristic seconds, is no exception. Yet the Schola’s performance was curiously and almost artificially restrained, sounding no different than in the similarly expressive following line, “and hath exalted the humble and meek.”

Schola Cantorum has announced the selection of esteemed Bay Area choral conductor Paul Flight as its new music director. This could be an excellent pairing, as Flight should be able to add a sense of vigor and direction to the Schola’s solid foundation of refinement and beauty. I wish them luck for the next 10 years.

Sunday afternoon at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, the group offered a splendid demonstration of its approach with a program combining works from its past seasons, recent Volti commissions, and a premiere of a work composed for its 2008 Choral Arts Laboratory. Conducted with care and precision by Geary, and sung to a tonal sheen by the 20-member chorus, the program closed the group’s season on a decidedly high note.

Titled “Past, Present, and Future Adventures,” the program included works by Ronald Caltabiano, William Hawley, Aaron J. Kernis, George Lam, Eric Moe, and Steven Stucky, and spanned nearly the entirety of Volti’s 29-year history, from the eldest entry, Hawley’s 1981 Two Motets, to the newest, Lam’s 2008 Words Become Unlatched. Each work received a polished, energized, fully committed performance.

With the opening work, Stucky’s 1996 Cradle Songs, Volti’s voices made a thrilling first impression. The composer’s settings of three folk lullabies elicited a pure, silken ensemble sound from the group, beginning with the hypnotic Brazilian song “Rouxinol do Pico Preto,” followed by the gently insinuating Polish Christmas song “Lulajze, Jezuniu” and the lively, lilting “Buy Baby Ribbon” (from Trinidad and Tobago).

For sheer sonic beauty, though, the afternoon’s high point came in two excerpts from Kernis’ 1998 Ecstatic Meditations. The composer incorporates texts by the 13th-century mystic Mechthild of Magdeburg, whose writings, as the title suggests, blend faith, poetry, and sensuality in a fertile marriage. Kernis matched them with braided vocal lines, pulsing dance rhythms, and, in the second setting, a startling depiction of an intimate dance with God. The work calls for a spirited performance, and Geary and his singers delivered gloriously.

Rippling Sonic Possibilities

Geary continued to explore the sonic possibilities in Hawley’s Two Motets. The composer’s setting of two Roman texts — “Mosella,” by Ausonius, and “Te Vigilans Oculis,” by Petronius Arbiter — is for double chorus, with the four voices of each group further divided into two. The settings are quite different: “Mosella,” composed in major mode, depicts the colors and rippling patterns of the Mosel River, while “Te vigilans oculis,” which shifts to the minor, describes a lover alone at night. Yet Hawley links them handsomely with long, luxuriant phrases. Geary and the singers, positioned around the perimeter of the church, rendered them transcendent.

More brilliant text-setting was to come, in Caltabiano’s 1993 Metaphor, a trio of short settings by William Blake (”The Fly”), John Donne (”The Flea”), and Walt Whitman (”A Noiseless Patient Spider”). In each, the chorus evokes natural activity — a buzzing canon for the persistent fly, a graceful interweaving of vocal lines for the flea, the industrious casting of “filament, filament, out of itself” for the spider. Geary conducted briskly, and the singers made each one sound wonderfully distinct.

Moe’s O the Flesh Is Hot but the Heart Is Cold (a 2005 Volti commission) proved likewise evocative, with a densely constructed setting of text from Matthea Harvey’s prose-poem “Baked Alaska, a Theory of” from Sad Little Breathing Machine. This is a fairy tale for a contemporary audience, with the title phrase sung as a country song, and the moral of the story, “Love, love, love,” woven in gleaming strands of sound. Volti sang it with obvious relish.

Representing the newest end of the spectrum was Lam’s Words Become Unlatched, a set of seven madrigals Volti commissioned for its Choral Arts Laboratory this year, and being premiered on this program. Lam and his collaborator, poet Benjamin Rogers, built a mosaic from fragments of sound and text, with relationships as the dominant theme — “two latch onto each other out of desire,” it begins.

The chorus delivered the message in eloquent spoken, as well as sung, episodes; tenor Michael Eisenberg stepped out of the group to supply a violin solo. Words Become Unlatched seems intended to recall the chatterings of a conflicted brain. And while Rogers’ texts proved aptly incomprehensible, Lam’s cut-crystal score rang with clarity.

The concert began with a terrific rendition of Steve Reich’s 1986 version (reduced strings, no brass) of Desert Music, with the University Chamber Chorus and Worn Ensemble, impressively conducted by David Milnes. For 46 minutes of relentless pulsation, percussionists on xylophones, vibraphones, and marimbas kept perfectly to their paces. The intonation of the chorus was spot on and, for the most part, the words were clear. Milnes was particularly effective in making sure the many accents were articulated sharply. The rest of the chamber orchestra missed nary a note, blending successfully with their fellow performers.

But the music, despite the all-too-evident structure and significant literary content of William Carlos Williams’ antiwar poetry, wears down those who aren’t minimalistophiles. Unlike the music of Philip Glass, Reich’s music has plenty of fascinating subtlety. The trouble is, that very subtlety detours the active listener from going into the proper trance — the only way to avoid damage from marimba-xylo-vibraphone burn. It’s like taking a warm shower: delightful at first, as the spraying pulses stimulate the skin, but do it for 46 minutes and the skin (and psyche, in the case of Reich) becomes waterlogged and wrinkly.

Yet many people seem to love endless aural showers. Donal Henahan, when reviewing Desert Music’s first American performance for The New York Times, declared that “a generation reared on the monotonously simple rhythms of rock music provides just such a public” for an enthusiastic reception to Reich’s music. And indeed that was the response in Hertz Hall.

After more than a half hour of intermission, the University Chorus took the stage to perform James MacMillan’s Cantos Sagrados (Sacred songs), composed in 1989. Superimposing Latin religious texts on protest poetry from Latin America, Cantos poses a challenge to any chorus. Guest director Aya Ueda is to be congratulated for taking it on, for the results were of a quality to fairly assess this music of the Scottish-born composer whose takes on liberation theology have earned him an international reputation.

Intense Drama

The three poems set by MacMillan are intensely dramatic. “Identity,” by Ariel Dorfman, deals with the discovery of yet another political victim, “disappeared,” as a corpse in a river. The poem’s Latin text refers to delivering the souls of the faithful from the pains of hell. The second poem, Ana Maria Mendoza’s “The Virgin of Guadalupe,” questions why there is a shrine in Mexico, “where my brothers the Indians lived,” “a thousand thousand killed,” dedicated to the “Patron Saint of the Conquerors” from Spain. The Latin text reinforces the irony with “Hail, Mother, portal of heaven.”

The final and most dramatic poem, again by Dorfman, has the captain of a firing squad say, “Forgive me, compañero” to the condemned such that “the echo of his voice and of those fingers on his arm fills his body with light … and he almost does not hear the sound of the shots.” The Latin reads: “For our sake he was crucified.”

Would that the music matched the poetry! While the Latin superimpositions reinforce ironies, they are at times laid on ineffectually. Clarity is sacrificed without a corresponding musical payback in dynamic or harmonic intensity. I was especially disappointed that the musical representation of “I tell you his body fills with light” sounded more like sludge than photons.

By contrast, there are impressive moments at the beginning of the first poem when the tempo and phrasing projects how word spreads among the people that a body has been found — “What did you say, they found another one?” The slow, grandiose conclusion of the first canto, “I can bury my own dead,” is also quite powerful.

Needless to say, getting all the disparate lines together is a must for this music. For most of the time, in her conducting Ueda succeeded in doing so, with only one serious lapse in the return of the line “Sweet Virgin of Guadalupe” near the end of the second canto. A further complication lay in synchronizing the organ part, which Susan Matthews performed at her console located above and behind the stage. While adequate for the MacMillan, this distance became an issue in the concluding work of the concert, Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms.

Oomph Out

The Psalms is performed almost as often nationally as Bernstein’s most popular pieces, and deservedly so. It contains wonderful melodies, infectious rhythms, and every bit as much drama as the MacMillan. The orchestral version is replete with Bernstein’s genius of orchestration, but when shorn of that the version with only drums, harp, and organ removes much of the oomph from the music. This must be replaced in one way or another by choral power and excellence.

Unfortunately, neither was much in evidence in Saturday’s concert. In the first movement, the main melody, reinforced by instruments in the orchestral version, simply didn’t emerge from the chorus alone. In the second movement, Jack Lundquist did a fair job as a slightly weak, watery, but on-pitch boy soprano in the second movement, though the chorus fell out of synch in the “Why do the nations rage?” section. Furthermore, the harp was overamplified.

Matthews’ organ introduction to the third movement was effective, though later she and Dan Levitan on harp could not stay together — a spatial difficulty that perhaps could have been resolved by Ueda in rehearsal. The gorgeous melody on “Adonai, Adonai” (with its breathtaking shift to a subtonic chord a half-step down from G to F-sharp major, a trick perhaps learned from George Antheil’s Fourth Symphony) was well sung, but it suffered from excessive rubato here and there. To add to my overall disappointment with this performance, neither of the solo quartets used in the outer movements was up to the challenge of the few notes given them.

Given the combinations of piece and performance — problematic/great, OK/OK, and great/problematic, respectively — I’d settle for problematic/great any day. At least with that combination, the composer will have received his proper day in court, and familiar expectations will not have been dashed.

“No, they are not,” I might have said. Of the thousands upon thousands of choral groups that grace the American landscape, precious few are as fine-tuned and impeccably voiced as San Francisco Choral Artists. Even close up, in the second row of Oakland’s St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, where the fine acoustic covers precious little, the voices blend smoothly. The soloists are also exceptionally poised, with mostly excellent diction and nigh-perfect timing. No wonder Choral Artists was chosen to sing eight of the pieces on the program we had just heard offered to some 1,000 choral conductors who recently attended the American Choral Conductors Association Western Division Convention.

San Francisco Choral Artists

But that was not all that Janet asked. “Does all choral music tend to blend together and sound so indistinguishable?”

Well, no. Nor was all the music the same, by a long shot. Especially in the first half, there were some interesting dissonances, some unusual (if hardly spiky) harmonies, and a variety of tempos. (I’ll talk about those shortly.) But in this “Music Home-Grown” concert of 19 short pieces (22 selections total), which included music by 14 composers who have written or arranged music for the ensemble over the quarter century of its existence, there was an unquestionable sameness of dynamics — lots of shades of piano, with hardly a fortissimo to be heard — and a sameness of affect. It was an afternoon of lovely singing of lovely music.

No fewer than three times during the course of the afternoon, the sounds of sirens punctuated the sweetness. If the mind chose to leave the music and follow the sirens, I could perhaps imagine an emergency vehicle or two, rushing from the scene of Oakland’s latest homicide, heading toward nearby Kaiser or Pill Hill. But inside St. Paul’s, where not a singer was fazed, nor a cell phone was heard, all was springtime loveliness.

Spoken Introductions

The concert was divided into five sections: “Voices of Poets,” “Sacred Spaces,” “American Vernacular,” “American Sacred Tradition,” and “In Our Backyard.” Rather than supplying copious program notes and composer biographies, which in the case of so many different composers and arrangers would have cost the lives of several trees, Artistic Director and Conductor Magen Solomon briskly introduced most selections. Her commentary was informative, covering the unusual seventh at the end of Mark Winges’ Agnus Dei and the poetic imagery of Herbert Bielawa’s Dance. We learned that four of the composers were current or former Choral Artist singers, and that six have served as composers in residence. And we smiled in turn.

Two selections from former Composer in Residence Bielawa’s Sojourner Songs distinguished the first section. “The Magic” had a truly magical melody, its rapidly repeated 16th notes seeming like little bursts of light or a flock of hummingbirds flitting about. The “fluffy flowers” in “Dance” seemed to dance about — the music was that full of promise and life.

In the “Sacred Spaces” section, only a confirmed grinch might have failed to warm to John Karl Hirten’s Child of Sweetness, in which the words “O my child” were repeated as if rocking an infant to sleep. Winges’ Agnus Dei was also something special (as is much of his music), instantaneously creating a sense of sacred space.

Current Composer in Residence Robin Estrada’s Awit sa Panginoon presented a curious juxtaposition between Filipino chant and bel canto phrasing. (One short section seemed snatched from Bellini’s Mira, o Norma.) But despite some of the most energetic singing of the afternoon, the performance lacked a vibrant edge. Everything was too homogenized, too contained, too sweet. If these perchance were native chants, you can bet your bottom dollar that the natives had been properly clothed by Christian missionaries before being allowed to sing.

More Piquancy Needed

The “American Vernacular” section of the program served up four works. Peter Urquhart’s The Chickens They Are Crowin’ was as droll as it sounds, and Ted Allen’s Coyote Song / ¡Ay Susanita! was a delightful south-of-the-border variation of Oh Susannah! “Wants more bite and vigor — too polite,” I wrote in my notes.

After intermission, the “American Sacred Tradition” section yielded five predictably harmonious classics. I kept longing for large choirs, massed voices, huge waves of energy. (Others might have opted for a latté.) Sacred does not necessarily mean soft and gentle.

The final section, “In Our Backyard,” began with Kirke Mechem’s Loveliest of Trees and ended with Henry Mollicone’s National Weather Forecast. There were blizzards in the Midwest and thunderstorms back east, but, as the song kept reminding us, in California it was always “sunny and mild.” In St. Paul’s, as well. As I exited into a chilly breeze, this lover of Mozart, Schubert, and Brahms kept longing for some Alban Berg.

Due to the nature of the pieces performed and precious little explanation from the stage, however, the audience had to put in a bit of work to take in the music. But the task was not too difficult; the sincerity with which both ensembles offered music to a full house of equally enthusiastic listeners was not unlike the gratifying messages one normally expects from a church’s pulpit.

Chanticleer

The program began with a song cycle for mixed choir and string quartet, titled From the Path of Beauty by acclaimed composer Chen Yi, who was in attendance. The premiere of Chen’s work had occurred the night before and, if her body language indicated anything as she took her seat moments before the house lights dimmed, Chen was pleased and eager to hear her work realized for only the second time.

The program notes explain the cycle as a journey “through the history of beauty in Chinese arts, from the ancient totems to the figurines, from poetry to calligraphy, from dance to music — from the thoughts to spirit.” Its seven songs (”The Bronze Taotie,” “The Ancient Totems,” “The Rhymed Poems,” “The Clay Figurines,” “The Secluded Melody,” “The Dancing Ink,” and “The Village Band”) were each imbued with characteristics suggested by their titles, though the extent to which each piece is programmatic was not obvious.

Chen’s writing is engaging, and straddles a line between a 20th-century soundscape — with jagged dissonances, volatile textures, and contemporary performance techniques for string instruments and voice — and a more olden and, perhaps to some listeners, foreign musical world.

Shanghai Quartet

Performing alone in the first song and along with the string quartet in four others, Chanticleer was entrusted with elements of traditional Chinese folk music and performed its parts — made up of nonsense syllables and, at times, vocal effects — with conviction and precision. The Shanghai Quartet blended exceptionally well with the choir and, in turn, played with gusto when brought to the fore.

Covert Melody

The highlight of Chen’s composition came in the performance of the fifth song, “The Secluded Melody,” which featured both ensembles. A beautiful arioso melody in the violins is paired with a solemn, Palestrina-like choral texture in the first section; a strong rhythmic pulse drives both quartet and choir in the second section; and the song culminates in a lyrical third section where what could be perceived as the clandestine melody is openly exchanged, in fragments, between members of the quartet.

The second half of the program featured choir and quartet separately. Chanticleer took the stage first, performing three works by Ligeti (Pápainé, Idegen Földön, and Magány) and one by Ravel (an arrangement of “Soupir” from Trois Poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé by Clytus Gottwald). Matthew D. Oltman, Chanticleer’s assistant music director and a tenor, offered brief remarks about Pápainé, but, without so much as a word toward the remaining pieces by its composer, the otherwise remarkably attractive songs were barely distinguishable from each other solely by virtue of their Hungarian poetry.

The brilliant voices of sopranos Michael Match and Michael McNeil and alto Cortez Mitchell stood out, yet the arrangement of Ravel’s “Soupir” (originally for solo voice and chamber orchestra) most completely exploited the truly orchestral timbre and luxuriant resonance of the ensemble.

The Shanghai String Quartet completed the program with Ravel’s String Quartet in F Major. I greatly appreciated how well the members of Chanticleer work together by seeing, immediately afterward, the intimate and intense exchange of the Quartet. The first movement opened at a fairly brisk tempo, but the tenderness of Ravel’s writing was clear by the tempo change in the middle of the movement, and the Quartet remained brilliant until the final dramatic notes of the piece.

A testament to the success of Chen’s work and that of the ensembles came after they all took their bows, and after the gratifying applause and standing ovations. Chanticleer and the Shanghai Quartet endearingly performed arrangements of three traditional Chinese folk songs, also by the composer of the evening, Chen Yi. Oltman announced the titles of the three works, and the audience acknowledged the work he put into their pronunciations with appreciative giggles.

(Speaking of pleasure, waking and sleeping,
Feast on pleasure, or otherwise we shall die.)

These words end Clément Janequin’s Song of the Lark, which was performed by the all-male vocal group Clerestory on Sunday. As an epigram it might as well serve as the group’s unofficial slogan. It is quite obvious that the most important aspect of the members’ collaboration together — and possibly the most refreshing thing about this young group — is the immense pleasure they seem to enjoy when singing together. That pleasure and enthusiasm are infectious, and the few audience members present on Sunday had the rare opportunity to hear intimate music performed intimately at Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, despite its large size.

The Clerestory Singers

Photo by Justin Montigne

I had the chance to review Clerestory once before at last year’s American Bach Soloists’ SummerFest, and noted then its remarkable clarity and unique timbre. Those qualities are still evident. The group possesses a seemingly magical ability to create a balanced and cohesive tone, while in no way suppressing the broad diversity of voices that make up the group. True, there is a “core” to its sound, as well as to its membership, generated by the fact that many of the founding members also have associations with Chanticleer.

But Chanticleer this group is not. While its “big brother” is famous for its generous sponsors, Grammy awards, and international fame, something about Clerestory (and maybe this is just its “spin”) remains aggressively grassroots. The members remark in their mission statement, “We have undertaken something daring: to turn the elite Bay Area choral scene from something less commercial to … something local, sustainable, and pure.” In pursuit of these aims, Clerestory has undertaken such inviting measures as offering free informal receptions after its programs, and, more remarkably, making all its concert recordings free for CD-quality download from its Web site.

The group’s generosity doesn’t end with free food and sound files, however; it also has a social conscience, donating 5 percent of its ticket sales to nonprofit environmental organizations. (Considering the financial state of musical arts organizations, Clerestory’s contributions will probably never lead to alternative fuel sources, but it’s an awfully nice gesture.)

Graceful Versatility

I am hesitant to mention these extramusical qualities of their presentations, because they may sound like fluff, the actions of a group not up to high performance standards. But that’s hardly the case. The members of Clerestory manage a grab bag of repertoire with ease and grace, on Sunday shifting between Palestrina and Britten, Howells and Byrd, as quickly as the group could rearrange itself onstage.

Listeners were wowed by precision and clarity in the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s Mass for Five Voices. The sweet dissonances in Victoria’s Super flumina Babylonis were enough to move me to tears.

It’s particularly remarkable that, crotchety reviewer that I am, I even enjoyed Clerestory’s rendition of the Ozark folk song Black Sheep. Here was an urbane, suavely dressed a cappella ensemble singing a folk song arranged by John Rutter — Rutter, for goodness sake, purveyor of saccharine junk popular among high school choirs and glee clubs. And I liked it, quite a lot. If that’s not testament to the power of Clerestory’s total package — a combination of enthusiasm, generosity, and high-level professionalism — then I don’t know what is.

When performed well, however, Gerontius is certain to make a lasting impression. And when the Sacramento Choral Society and Orchestra performed the work in Sacramento’s Community Center Theater on Saturday, they made a powerful statement, indeed. The SCSO’s 180 choristers, three soloists, and full orchestra did more than just connect with the fervor and grittiness demanded by Elgar’s two-part oratorio. They also made this large-scale work deeply human.

Donald Kendrick

Much of the success of this performance was due to the conducting of Music Director Donald Kendrick, who was able to conduct the entire 90-minute work from memory. He kept the chorus and orchestra tightly focused, and on a crisp pace. This was the second time that Kendrick has conducted the work this decade with the SCSO, and his familiarity with the piece showed in his conducting.

Ultimate Questions

Near the end of his life, Elgar said that Gerontius was the work he wanted most to be remembered by. It’s easy to understand why, for the work is as iconoclastic and personal an oratorio as it is a universal one. Key to that quality is the 900-line poem by the theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman that serves as its libretto. The poem, written in 1865, is composed of Catholic liturgy-inspired thoughts about how terrifying, and rewarding, it can be to meet your maker. It begins with a man named Gerontius (a name derived from the Greek word for “old age”) on his deathbed. In the second part (which, in the oratorio, typically begins after a pause instead of an intermission), Gerontius transits into the afterlife. This, in turn, leads to a redemptive end in Purgatory.

And so Gerontius is, more than anything else, a tale for Everyman. The cornerstone role in the oratorio is, of course, that of the dying man himself. It was handled with subtlety and fervor by lyric tenor Richard Clement. He offered a warm and radiant tenor that he girded with a robust stage presence. Clement’s singing embodied the idea that life is both great and minuscule. He effectively communicated the vulnerability that comes with facing the unknown. And at softer volume levels his singing was deep and meaningful.

Kathleen Moss, in the role of the Angel, displayed a well-rounded mezzo-soprano. Her singing was appropriately brooding, but richly exultant when needed. In the role of the Angel of Agony, Sean Cooper unleashed a booming bass-baritone that filled the hall. But at times his singing was compromised by fuzzy diction. Some wobbly moments also crept in at the end of lines.

The chorus, which Elgar uses sparingly in Gerontius, sang with sophistication and dramatic grit. There are incredibly fluid, but unconventional, choral movements in this work, particularly in the second part during the “Choir of the Angelicals.” Throughout, these musicians handled their parts with a red-blooded urgency.

In the orchestral writing, Elgar mirrors the inner turmoil of the oratorio’s central character. To that end, he deploys a variety of meters and textures. Despite overly loud playing, which drowned out some singing, and a few weak moments among the horns, the orchestra hit the mark.

Although 19th-century oratorios are not that popular with concert programmers, the deep impression that Gerontius makes on audiences and musicians whenever it is performed would justify more regular presentations. But don’t hold your breath. For now, Gerontius’ repertory status remains an unanswered question.