Chanticleer celebrates several musical milestones this fall. The men's chorus' opening program of the season, titled "Wondrous Free," honors the 250th anniversary of America's earliest surviving secular composition, Frances Hopkinson's My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free. The concert program, heard last Thursday, was a marvelous gambol through five centuries of the repertoire Chanticleer so frequently champions, choral music of the Americas.
Chanticleer
On a more personal level, Joseph Jennings, who joined the ensemble as a countertenor and soon became its artistic advisor, celebrates his 25th year with “the boys.” Bass Eric Alatorre, known for his handlebar moustache and “doo-wop” vocal solidity, has reached 18 years of service, and music director and tenor Matthew Oltman caps his first decade.
Alatorre and Oltman’s combined 28 years exactly equals the time that Chanticleer’s other 10 full-time professional vocalists have sung with the group. Yet, performing before a far-less-than-packed audience in Berkeley’s resonant First Congregational Church, the ensemble seemed unchanged, exhibiting the supreme combination of sweetness, vitality, and musical impeccability that has made them prized around the world. To borrow the title of Hopkinson’s song, Chanticleer’s singing remains wondrous free.
One oft-used criticism of Chanticleer’s signature sound is that it is sometimes too gentle, soft, and (dare I say it) effete to do some of the music they program full justice. No such complaints will surface about the 21 songs performed on “Wondrous Free.” Strong, vital, and forthright when the music required it, caressingly tender and sweet at other times, Chanticleer demonstrated remarkable versatility in far-ranging repertoire.
High-flung Glories
If the final selections of their season opener especially stood out, it was because three of the four songs called for high-voiced soloists. In Marshall Bartholomew’s unusual arrangement of Shenandoah, soprano Gregory Peebles, the newest member of Chanticleer, sang with lovely sweetness and purity. His is a very different, and far more welcome, sound than the slightly hooty top line heard on the opening selection of the evening, the traditional Appalachian tune Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.
Cortez Mitchell may be classified as a lower-voiced alto, but the astounding, glistening tone and gratifyingly even, operatic-style vibrato he brought to Gershwin’s Summertime had far more in common with what we’re used to hearing from first-rank sopranos and high mezzos than from countertenors. Mitchell’s octave leap at the end, although a touch flat, left jaws agape. Kirby Shaw’s arrangement, however, was a curious affair, segueing from Gershwin’s vocal line to an incongruous light, jazz/swing “doo doo da doo” bridge. Regardless, Mitchell’s marvelous performance triumphed over the arrangement’s mongrel pedigree.
Soprano Dylan Hostetter, now in his fifth season, distinguished himself in Jennings’ familiar arrangement of Keep Your Hands on the Plow. His is not as pure a voice as the others, but its strength suited the music perfectly.
Programming Perfection
Any choral director seeking guidance in how to construct the perfect program would be wise to examine the evening’s sequence. After four early American songs, three of which represented the somewhat naive-sounding, straightforward, “shape note” singing tradition (including A. M. Cagle’s Depression-era Soar Away), the boys segued into two gorgeous, far more sophisticated, 17th-century pieces from the Spanish regions of the Americas. Juan Gutierrez de Padilla’s serene Circumdederunt me dolores mortis (The sorrows of death encircled me) and Juan de Lienas’ more energetic Credidi (I have believed) gave Chanticleer the opportunity to exhibit the caressing, spiritual sound for which it is duly prized.
After soaring to the spiritual heights, the choir crash landed with two madrigals by the most profound of contemporary, secular composers, P.D.Q. Bach. The absence of the freshest Bach’s lyrics made it hard to distinguish much more than repeated moans of “Oy veh” in The Queen to Me a Royal Pain Doth Give. My Bonnie Lass She Smelleth provided sufficient compensation. That Chanticleer’s members were able to joke around and cut up onstage seemed especially surprising in light of the stilted manner with which they introduced several of the program’s eight sections. When will these gentlemen learn to address their audience without sounding like Perfect 10 graduates of the Marilyn Monroe Finishing School?
Post-P.D.Q. came more contemporary fare. Samuel Barber’s three early Reincarnations, Op.16, were filled with variety, beauty, and moving passages. They also called for quite different technique than did the fascinating, vocally-generated rattle sounds and fluid rhythm of Mohican Indian Brent Michael Davids’ Night Chant.
Most gratifying were two premieres: our own David Conte’s The Homecoming: In memoriam Martin Luther King, Jr., and Eric Whitacre’s “Sleep, My Child” from Paradise Lost: Shadows and Wings. Conte’s work, a Chanticleer commission, sets an impassioned and thought-provoking poem by John Stirling Walker, in which a soul expresses anger and frustration that the justice King called for has yet to come to pass. Both poem and music have so much going for them that the work demands repeated hearings. Chanticleer’s sopranos excelled as they sang, “Make them shine with the salve of the babes who called them ‘home’.”
Whitacre was Whitacre, the music gorgeous, soothing, and filled with caressing harmonies. Chanticleer was Chanticleer, voicing phrases that were balm to the ears. At the risk of repeating an oft-used phrase, their singing was incomparably beautiful and lovely. That’s what makes them Chanticleer.
Jason Victor Serinus regularly reviews music and audio for Stereophile, SFCV, Classical Voice North America, AudioStream, American Record Guide, and other publications. The whistling voice of Woodstock in She’s a Good Skate, Charlie Brown, the longtime Oakland resident now resides in Port Townsend, Washington.
