Three Decades of Spirited Singing

In a celebration of its 30th anniversary, Chanticleer is singing a concert titled "My Spirit Sang All Day," all this week. The program starts in the Renaissance, where Chanticleer began 30 years ago, then skips to the 20th and 21st centuries. There was no Schubert this time, but still plenty of variety. Saturday's performance at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music's spiffy new concert hall presented Chanticleer at its considerable best — emotionally moving, musically masterful, and rousing good fun, with voices strong both in solo and ensemble and in singing and speaking. William Byrd's Sing Joyfully, calling up the joyful noise of the Psalms, set the mood of the concert. The singers, grouped randomly on the stage for the joyful piece, then resolved themselves into traditional sections, soprano to bass, for two Latin motets. Byrd's Ave verum corpus (Hail, true body) was a model of perfect intonation, ravishing choral sound, and beautifully expressive phrasing. The group then shifted to a double-chorus arrangement for Palestrina's Ave Regina Coelorum (Hail, Queen of Heaven), balancing a solo quartet weighted toward the high voices (two sopranos, tenor, and bass) with the rest of the chorus (the lower alto, tenor, and bass). Throughout the concert, imaginative groupings reflected varieties of musical constructions.

Four secular works by the great Renaissance composer Josquin des Prez gave the singers plenty of scope to show off their talents. A solo quartet nailed the quintessential patter song El grillo (The cricket); all joined to express a thousand regrets (Mille Regretz), a song of parting; the singers built phrase upon phrase sequentially in Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer (I can't help loving you); and they produced a raucous honky-tonk sound for Scaramella va alla guerra (Scaramella is off to war). Next up, a premiere: All Things Resounding by Janika Vandervelde, commissioned in 2006 by the Jerome Foundation in memory of Maud Hill Schroll. The text, from Goethe's Faust, divided into three parts by the composer, celebrates the cosmic harmony of the universe. The piece came into being with humming, working up from the basses, followed by solo voices and then by the chorus, on the text "How all things weave themselves into a whole." The second section, starting with "How celestial powers rise and fall," rose and fell rather more often than necessary to make its point, but the combination of humming and interweaving solo and choral sections was generally effective. In the course of the third section, the room rang with high harmonics, the result of both perfect intonation in the chorus and Tuva-style harmonics created by bass Eric Alatorre. It would be hard to predict whether other choruses could achieve the same effect; certainly Chanticleer can. Individual chorus members gave spoken introductions to some pieces, with varying degrees of success. Some were rather stilted, and included material best left to written program notes. And I was amused to hear Schroll described as "ahead of her time" in her love of nature, as if our natural environment had only recently been discovered. Have younger generations not heard of John Muir and Theodore Roosevelt, or what used to be called conservation?

Lost in Song, Then Found

The first half of the program ended back in the early 20th century with two solo songs arranged for chorus: Samuel Barber's "Heaven-Haven," the composer's own arrangement of "A Nun Takes the Veil" from his Hermit Songs; and Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" (I have become lost to the world) from his Rückert Lieder, originally written for voice and piano, then for voice and orchestra. The choral arrangement draws on the orchestration and moves the original song cunningly among various solo voices and sections. After intermission, the theme of the concert was recalled by Steven Sametz' setting of an English farmer's reminiscence, I Have Had Singing. Poulenc's setting of the Four Little Prayers of St. Francis of Assisi ensued, followed by the second new work of the evening, Gabriele Lena Frank's Jalapeño Blues, commissioned by Minnesota's "Saint Paul Sunday" radio program for performance by Chanticleer. Frank's setting of four poems by Trinidad Sánchez Jr. ("Trino") is written in a variety of styles, and like Vandervelde's piece, is written to Chanticleer's strengths. The jazzy "Jalapeño Blues" makes use of solo voices and chorus, Spanish and English, verse and chorus. Although Frank's writing is spiked with effective dissonance at times, I had the impression that there was also occasional gratuitous flatting in the soprano section (not a major flaw). "Chicanofobia" considers what it means (or doesn't mean) to be a Chicano, interspersing the spoken voice, sometimes in terrific glissandi, with singing. "A Poem About Brandon Dever" combines narrative with a swinging refrain, building to a stunning climax at the suicide of 15-year-old Brandon Dever. Perhaps the arrant nonsense of the final song, "Why do men wear earrings on one ear?" was meant to help the audience recover from the Dever ballad, but it ran on a bit too long. The composers of both of the new works were in the audience, and drew warm applause. The concert continued with several arrangements of folk songs, including some especially well-sung solos. Music Director Joseph Jennings, his singers so well-prepared that they conduct themselves, was enjoying their performance from the audience; he was represented on stage by a medley of his deeply felt gospel song arrangements. After an invitation to the audience to join the singers for some celebratory champagne, a last encore went back full circle to the beginning: a setting of the text "My spirit sang all day."