Saturday night's concert by San Francisco's full-range men's vocal ensemble Clerestory witnessed a rare occurrence in the world of concert music — a set of new works by local composers that were both the strongest pieces on the program and the best received by the audience. Usually, recitals of this kind try to dispense with such necessarily distasteful business of new music by getting the token new overture over quickly before attending to the meatier material at hand. Alternatively, higher-profile premieres are often talked up, receptioned, Champagned, press-released, and micromanaged to a requisite amount of professed enthusiasm before the performing material is quietly disenfranchised from the music library's permanent collection.Clerestory
The sad thing about such a system is that it skirts something essential about composition; namely, the creation of music to reflect the concerns and artistry of the composer's own time. Until the last century, most music was new music, and concerts were often built around star power of the performing artists. The modern attitude is somewhat different — anything beyond the standard repertory is given the tag "adventurous" (scare quotes my own). I tend to disdain this term. It seems too much a code word for something you won't like that's been spiced up to sound exciting, like throwing salt and butter on overcooked canned vegetables.
Clerestory built Saturday's motley program on a theme of "explorations," and I feel they approached the programming in a true spirit of adventure, rather than just as an effort to market nonrepertory works. Although an SATB ensemble of Clerestory's makeup (with men singing soprano and alto in falsetto) might be expected to specialize in early music, overall this ensemble tended to excel in newer music. The audience at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley evidently agreed with this strategy.
Oakland composer Paul Crabtree's piece There Came a Day, set to a subtly adult children's poem by Ted Hughes, was a masterpiece in timing the eliciting of spontaneous laughter from the audience. It's a tribute to the composer to be able to make evident a subtle joke (I didn't get it on my initial read), in the way a Shakespearean actor makes clear a spoken text that a playgoer can barely read on the printed page. Comedy without gimmickry is one of the hardest compositional crafts, and one at which Crabtree excels.
Composers of Promise
Strong pacing was also evident in the works of Minna Choi and Ilya Demutsky, both graduate composition students at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Their works were front-runners at a choral composition contest at that school earlier this year, and the cause of their success was readily apparent to the ears. The composers chose to set very short texts by Federico García Lorca, but in ways that managed to extend and prolong the symbolic texts into two-minute pieces.
Choi, opting for a slow setting, created a motto chord on the word sleep, which served as an anchor to hold the entire piece together. In strong contrast, Demutsky, in his considerably faster and aptly named work, Dance, created a rhythmic refrain–like figure punted across differing vocal groupings, gradually encroaching on the end of the poem. If they keep creating works like these, both composers should go far.
I was less impressed with Clerestory member Jessie Antin's Harmonice Mundi. Although sweetly well-crafted and chorally idiomatic, the piece needlessly cycled through the text several times in the way that composers like Choi and Demutsky avoided. Music and text work together: If a text is too short for the music, find a longer text. Antin also introduced a gratuitous harmonium drone that could easily have been composed into the choral voices.
Clerestory also resurrected some compositional duds. Admittedly, listeners might not be surprised to find a few among Darius Milhaud's 443 opus numbers, but his run-on, disjointed, boring, undeveloped, and bizarre setting of Psalm 51 should top the list of works thankfully not in repertory. I also felt Dutch composer Joep Franssens (b. 1955) must have some sort of cognitive dissonance, judging from the work he proffered, titled Nos to agere dico, to a text of Benedict de Spinoza. What the sugary-sweet choral writing had to do with the dense lorem-ipsumesqe philosophical text, I have no idea. The effect was akin to Puccini setting the phone book.
The ensemble also missed the mark in its performance of the Stravinsky completion of Gesualdo's penitential psalm Illumina nos, rendering a bland output at about half the tempo I've ever heard it. The singers made up for their transgression many times over in a perfect, rousing performance of five folk song settings by Vaughan Williams, programmed to honor the composer 50 years after his death.
Rounding out the program were three 14th-century English songs, a long chanson by Claude le Jeune, and a beautifully understated Spanish-language setting of Crux fidelis by Washington, D.C.–based composer Leo Nestor.
Clerestory, as always, sings with polish, pure tuning, strong blend, and direct communication. If I found any fault with the singing, it was a tendency toward nasality by a few voices and an understandable need for a bit more rehearsal time. Although the case could be made that the Bay Area does not necessarily need another small, full-range, male-voiced, professional-level choral ensemble whose name starts with a C, I doubt that I would have heard Saturday's program otherwise, and area residents should be grateful to have such wonderful artistic options. Unlike most ensembles, Clerestory lacks a designated artistic director — a situation that gives it both strength and weakness, but that should play to Clerestory's advantage.
