Think Global, Sing Local

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With an abundance of choices for choral music this season, you might want to mark your calendar for “Canción de Navidad,” the Dec. 12 and 13 concerts of Clerestory, a relative newcomer to the Bay Area’s choral scene. Founded in 2006, the nine-member male ensemble features seasoned soloists and veterans from the area’s best choruses.

The size of the group, according to countertenor Justin Montigne, is ideal for a more democratic and collaborative approach than larger groups are able to provide. He adds, “There’s a certain critical mass you reach where you need to have a director, and we’re small enough and have, each of us, a depth of experience, so that we don’t need that. We can decide to do things by consensus and that’s very important to us. Also, just the intimacy of being able to hear a voice across the arc and pick out individuals and be singing with individuals as a group, I think at around 10 or 11 that goes away and you become a chorus; and we’re still a small ensemble. I think the intimacy of it is really special.”

The group has received many positive reviews in its short history and has released one live recording (a compilation of its first and second seasons). The group is scheduled to record its first studio album next summer. According to Montigne, this has been a year of clarifying the group’s vision. This includes keeping things very local (between their time singing with Chanticleer and other ensembles, these men have logged many hours on the road), keeping the music affordable (the price for the upcoming concerts is just $17), and making their music accessible (all concerts are available as free downloads on the group’s Web site).

Last year’s holiday concert featured music of France and Germany, and what Montigne calls “more quite-tranquil Christmas beauty,” so this year, the ensemble consciously chose to make the holiday concert a livelier, more toe-tapping experience. (Several of the numbers will call on the singers to become percussionists.) “I think the familiarity is there for people to need to have a few carols to hang their hats on, but there is also a lot of beautiful and unknown stuff that we can introduce people to,” Montigne says. Featuring traditional Western holiday music excludes a body of repertoire that Montigne thinks may have particular meaning to the Bay Area and its relatively large Latino population. The group is looking forward to the Sunday concert, which will take place in San Francisco’s Mission District.

The group’s founder, countertenor Jesse Antin, explains the format for the concert. “Rather than proceeding strictly chronologically, the concert treats the Christmas and Advent seasons liturgically, with sets of pieces (in different styles and from different periods) about the Annunciation (i.e., the appearance of the Angel Gabriel), the worship of the Virgin Mary, the birth of Jesus, the visit of the Shepherds and Magi, etc.”

The repertoire is probably as diverse a selection as you’ll find this season, as it includes pieces from Spain, Portugal, the Basque country, and Central and South America, as well as some Aztec and Mayan pieces. Christmas carols written in the U.S. (rather than simply American versions of English carols) will also be performed.

Whether it be Lauridsen’s arrangement of O Magnum Mysterium, Guerrero’s Virgen Sancta, or It Came Upon a Midnight Clear, it’s likely to be worth your time and effort to hear Clerestory either in Berkeley or in San Francisco, to see realized this small ensemble’s vision of a lively, intimate holiday concert.