Chanticleer: Out of This World. September 17, 2010

This was the opening concert in San Francisco for Chanticleer's 33rd season. There are two new singers this year. Casey Breves is a soprano, and just graduated from Yale. I met him at the auditions back in February, and I saw him again in April, at Yale, soon after he had gotten the offer from Chanticleer. Mike Axtell is a new baritone/bass. I met him in 2009 at the "Chanticleer Summer Camp" (officially the Summer Choral Workshop at Sonoma State, where 80 singers get together with Chanticleer, arriving on a Wednesday and performing a concert on Sunday). Anyway, both new singers are excellent, as you might imagine.

The theme for the concert, Out of This World!, provided a convenient excuse to sing anything having to do with stars or heaven, which includes just about everything that Chanticleer is likely to sing. I was expecting a "difficult" concert, but when a concert starts with Palestrina (Mary is assumed into heaven), there's nothing to worry about.

I'd forgotten the music of Francisco Guerrero, so I was unprepared for the beauty of the motet Hail, Queen of Heaven. I really hope they record this piece.

I checked my iTunes collections, and I have two other Guerrero motets there, one of which is the beautiful Virgen sancta, which opens with a soprano solo. I have two recordings of it, one from Chanticleer, recorded in 1990, and one from Clerestory, recorded 19 years later. The soloist is the same in both: the always-wonderful Chris Fritzsche.

Next, they launched into four madrigals, beginning with a pair of Monteverdis: Sfogava con le stelle, a piece that I learned long ago, and Ecco mormorar l'onde. The third madrigal was Fuggi dolor by William Hawley, which I've heard them sing several times recently. The fourth was written by Mason Bates, a well-known local composer and DJ, awash in well-deserved accolades these days. It is part of his Sirens song cycle, commissioned by Chanticleer last year. (He had a larger piece in the second half of the program. More anon.) After Bates' madrigal, they sang Britten's Hymn to Saint Cecilia, a piece I also learned long ago, when I sang with the Pacific Master Chorale down in Orange County. The Britten is a strange and difficult piece. The chords change at the drop of a hat (what key are we in now?), and with notes in the extreme high and low ranges, it's sometimes difficult to know whether the singers are still in tune. The text is by Auden and wanders far afield of Cecilia, the patron saint of music. I liked it, but that's only because I learned it. I think it would be hard to hear this for the first time, even reading the words, and get much out of it. Example: "O law drummed out by hearts against the still / Long winter of our intellectual will." Um, right. Got it.

The first half concluded with a Schumann piece for double chorus and what may be Chanticleer's new signature piece, Mahler's Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen. This is one of the Rückertlieder, arranged for chorus by Clytus Gottwald. It is a slow, luscious piece, with the richest of harmonies. It's very sad (roughly, I've had enough of the world). It's very difficult to sing well. Those rich sonorities come at a price: miss one little half step, or tuning, and we're off the rails. I've heard Chanticleer sing this piece many times. The first time was with Frederika von Stade as a soloist, accompanied, as it were, by Chanticleer. The original version was for solo and piano, but most people know it in the arrangement for soloist and orchestra. It was a signature piece for Janet Baker. Von Stade's performance was wonderful, and I remember that before she took her bow, she acknowledged the singers, particularly the sopranos, who were singing notes far above hers. Such a gracious lady.

The second half of the concert took a more literal view of being out of this world, starting with Kirke Mechem's Island in Space, which starts and ends with Dona nobis pacem, surrounding a text by an astronaut, Russell Schweichart, and another, far less interesting text, by Archibald Macleish. Schweichart observes that from his viewpoint aboard Apollo 9, there are no borders on the Earth, just a small, beautiful planet. The best line: "You realize that on that small spot is everything that means anything to you: all history, all poetry, all music, all art, death, birth, love, tears, all games, all joy -- all on that small spot."

Then we heard a large-scale piece by Mason Bates, Observer in the Magellanic Cloud. This was, in some ways, the centerpiece for the concert. The "observer" of the title is not a person but a satellite that sees, from a zillion miles away, Maori tribesmen, who are chanting to the satellite's own galaxy. The piece starts with electronic beeping, the sound of the satellite, which sets the pulse for the piece. The singing alternates between the satellite and the Maori tribesmen. In the middle, there's a tribal "dance," where the guys walk around in a circle. Shades of A Village Wedding. Let's just say that dance is not their forte. Indeed, walking is not their forte.

 I liked the Bates piece very much, and it was a polished performance, although the singers told me that it was fiendishly difficult to learn. They spent about 16 hours rehearsing it before recording it earlier this summer.

The last section of the concert had four "popular" pieces, starting with Steve Barnett's arrangment of a Harold Arlen song, Out of this world, followed by Gene Puerling's arrangement of Kurt Weill's Lost in the Stars, both of which Chanticleer has performed before. Then came the surprise: a piece billed as "indie rock." It was Cells Planets by Erika Lloyd, whose original performance with her group, Little Grey Girlfriend, you can hear on the Web. I listened to that, and it reminded me of Joni Mitchell, not my favorite stuff. But this arrangement, by Vince Peterson, was completely different. The backup band was replaced by voices, obviously, and the solo was given to the new soprano, Casey Breves, who has a perfect pop sound (albeit a couple of octaves up). He was clearly in his element, and I can just imagine that he must have been in this situation many times: a soloist surrounded by a chorus of really good male singers, namely, the Whiffenpoofs, Yale's most famous all-male singing group, and now the eleven other singers of Chanticleer. It was a star turn, and it brought the house down. The last piece, called Change the World, featured tenor Ben Jones. I don't remember hearing him sing a solo before. He has a very nice voice, perhaps a little too sotto voce for the situation, especially following bravura Breves, and the song is nothing to write home about, but I hope we get to hear more of Ben. In his pre-Chanticleer life, Ben was a featured singer in Beach Blanket Babylon, so he, too, should be comfortable in a solo spot.

There was an encore, of course: Joe Jennings' arrangement of Walk in Jerusalem. Matt Curtis had the first solo, but Brian Hinman took all the others -- by storm. Brian has a trumpet of a voice, loud when he needs it, but always clear and distinct, even in quiet passages. He has a long, plaintive solo at the beginning of Michael McGlynn's Agnus Dei, from two years ago, and that's one of my favorite bits from all their recordings. The piece itself is way too long; it should stop about one minute after the solo is done. It gets lost in pretty chords, alas, after the edgy beginning. Brian's solo is stunning because he brings out a sadness in the words that I had not understood before: Lamb of God, who takest away the sins of the world, have mercy on us. But think of it this way: O God, I'm so sorry for making such a mess of my life. Have mercy on me.

A second encore was required for this eager Friday-night audience, and we got Straight Street, with little solos from Eric Alatorre and Cortez Mitchell, about three octaves apart.

I went back and heard the Sunday performance. Some years ago, when I lived in the South Bay, I decided that I would never see another Chanticleer concert just once. They usually do two Bay Area performances, so it wasn't difficult to hear them twice. When I moved to San Francisco two years ago, I stopped going to their South Bay performances, so I did hear some concerts only once, but I've returned to my senses. The reason I like hearing it twice is that they may sing something that is unfamiliar, not recorded (by them, at least), and unlikely to show up at another local concert, anytime soon. That first Mahler performance, with von Stade, echoed in my head for, what?, six years until they finally started doing it again, sans soloist. The Guerrero piece in this program may vanish, too, so it was good to catch it a second time. At the Sunday performance, they replaced the two Monteverdi madrigals with a pair by Marenzio, and we got to hear a different quartet sing them, including the new baritone, Mike Axtell.

All in all, I thought this was an auspicious beginning for the 33rd season. Sometimes the opening concert is a little rocky, especially when there are new singers on board. But not this time. This group is solid. Go hear them. Twice, even.