Choral Music Magazine
MAY ISSUE
The men of Chanticleer have been rather busy lately. When I saw the 12-member “orchestra of voices” on April 27th, they were in upstate New York, singing a long concert of difficult repertoire ranging from Palestrina and Gesualdo to Poulenc and Gershwin. The night before, they were in the Temple of Dendur in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum, delivering the debut performance of their ambitious new mass, each movement written by a different composer. Anyone concerned about vocal fatigue or mental mistakes need not have worried, however. Performing in downtown Ithaca’s gorgeous and cavernous State Theatre, Chanticleer sang with their customary divine (almost inhuman) perfection.
I was curious to learn how the acoustics of the large Art Deco theatre would treat the sound of 12 un-amplified voices. The first moments of the concert seemed to bode well: Gerald Finzi’s My Spirit Sang All Day has an appealing directness and simplicity, and it rang clearly throughout the hall, showcasing Chanticleer’s strong soprano section to excellent effect. The plainsong Veni sponsa Christi was exquisitely blended, and might well have been the work of a single voice. As the group moved seamlessly into the long swelling phrases of the Palestrina polyphony, however, it became evident that sound in the hall, while very clear, is a bit distant and attenuated. The cascading crescendos and decrescendos, though sculpted with great sensitivity, sounded hushed and cool, rather than warm and engulfing.
The stark, clear acoustics would have magnified any mistakes of rhythmic ensemble, tuning or blend, but these are precisely the areas in which Chanticleer excels. The second set began with two pieces by the late Renaissance composer Carlo Gesualdo, who is famous first for murdering his wife and lover after catching them in flagrante delicto, and only second for his highly chromatic idiom. After hearing Chanticleer’s performance of the madrigals Ardita zanzaretta and Dolcissima mia vita, it may be time to reverse the order of those two claims to fame. Gesualdo’s madrigals deal with dramatic themes of love and death, often by contrasting slow, wildly chromatic sections with rhythmically complex, diatonic passages. Chanticleer negotiated the up-tempo sections with great precision and articulation, and the security of their tuning lent an organic grace to harmonic shifts which still sound shocking to the modern ear.
Chanticleer’s pure, unearthly tone was also effective during their performance of three pieces from Poulenc’s Sept Chansons, and Messiaen’s Trés vif from Cinq rechants was eerily transporting. The vigorous unison refrains had an appropriate verve, and the contrasting duet fauxbourdon verses were handled with an appropriate affectlessness; soprano Eric Brenner’s rhapsodic solo towards the end of the piece was breathtakingly secure. Stockhausen’s Die Nachtigal (a student piece written under the influence of Messiaen) from Chöre für Doris was thematically appropriate, but the piece itself is conventional and undistinguished, and it is difficult to imagine its inclusion if Stockhausen’s name did not carry a certain avant-garde cachet.
All in all, a strong and impressive opening, but as I listened to Chanticleer live, a certain sameness began to weigh on my nerves. Their constant gravity (not to say pretension) became ponderous, rather than impressive. At some point, I realized that the sound of the Palestrina madrigal was much the same as that of the Poulenc chansons. This homogeneity of tone had a disastrous effect on the Brahms song Nachtwache No. 1 from Funf Gesänge Op. 104. Though technically flawless, it was crippled by the same cool, airy sound that Chanticleer employed for nearly every piece. Here, the downside of Chanticleer’s vaunted vocal blend became clear: the male sopranos and altos sang with a lovely tone that nonetheless lacked the full-bodied sound that female singers could have lent to such a piece. Since the basses and tenors had to match the countertenors’ thin tone (for Romantic music), one seldom heard a ringing tenor or rumbling bass. Nachtwache No. 1 requires a sort of unmeasured Germanic passion, but in this performance, there were no guttural consonants, no heart-lurching crescendos, no human striving. Only a sort of hollow perfection, a spectral ghostly version of a piece which should be rooted in the physical obsessions of romantic love:
Awakened by the breath of love,
Breathe out, trembling . . . (Friedrich Rückert)
The Delius vocalise which followed, To Be Sung of a Summer Night on the Water, No. 1 was better suited to Chanticleer's sound, as was John Corigliano’s L’Invitation au voyage, though the latter piece was a bit lengthy and suffered from an overdependence on melodramatic harmonic third relations.
A lesser group might well have ended the concert when Chanticleer broke for intermission. In fairness, I should say that most of the audience members I overheard during the break seemed enraptured by Chanticleer’s technical mastery. Still, I wasn’t the only one who sensed something missing. One friend felt that their perfection was almost distracting. She found herself listening for mistakes, just to reassure herself that they were human. Personally, I felt a certain high modernist restraint, as if the group was trying to paint perfectly defined black and white squares with their voices. In any case, there seemed to be a reserve—something held back from the audience.
After returning from intermission, the repertoire shifted towards lighter, more popular fare. First, though, Chanticleer performed works by two of the most famous modern choral composers: Eric Whitacre, and John Tavener. Though both composers work with similar raw materials—deceptively simple melodies and warm dissonance—Whitacre’s This Marriage did not stand up well, compared to Tavener’s Village Wedding. Whitacre’s piece aimed for lyrical simplicity and produced only cheap sentimentality. By contrast, Tavener’s repetition of the simple melodic phrase, “Oh Isaiah, dance for joy, for the Virgin is with child,” carried a cumulative effect that felt incantatory and religious.
As the repertoire shifted to popular songs, however, the lack of vocal variety and self-seriousness began to take a heavier toll. The British folksong Just as the Tide Was Flowing, arranged by Ralph Vaughn Williams, was prettily sung, but marred by a certain stiffness; this English piece was very much in need of a sentimental wink to the audience. Musical Director Joe Jennings’ slow, chordal arrangement of the traditional American tune Calling my Children Home was lovely, but my attention wandered after a few undifferentiated verses. Chanticleer finally cut loose vocally on the traditional Korean song Jindo Arirang, delightfully arranged by Jeeyoung Kim. The piece was energetic and original, and should have been a highlight, but after an entire concert of painstakingly calibrated Western music, the keening nasal vocal tones and exaggerated enunciation carried a whiff of condescension. The concert ended on a strong note, however, with a vocal jazz version of Cole Porter’s It’s Alright with Me. Unlike the spirituals and folk songs, Chanticleer seemed to connect with the sophisticated wit of the old Jazz standard, and the ribald sexuality boiling just below the wordy surface kept things light and entertaining. One wished for more such moments.
Still, the highlight of the concert for me remained the performance of Village Wedding. John Tavener’s cerebral mysticism, his “holy minimalism,” is perfectly suited to accent Chanticleer’s purity of tone and intellectual unity. Their recording of the song is a masterpiece. In the wrong hands, the choreographed elements of the piece might seem hokey, but Chanticleer negotiated the stylized movements with conviction. Echoing the Greek Orthodox Wedding service, the singers formed a circle onstage around an imaginary altar, which they circled three times during the piece. As the 12 singers turned inwards, backs to the audience, and began to sing, it seemed like a metaphor for the entire concert: the audience somewhat excluded, though the sound was stunning and the singers unified.
Justin Nisly is a graduate of Cornell University with degrees in Music and English. He has contributed to shape note scholarship and performance practice, conducting and performing with a number of choirs, including the Cornell Glee Club, the Hutchinson Community College Concert Choral and the Reno Choral Society. Justin is also a theatrical music director and accompanist, and blogs at justinnisly.wordpress.com.
PHOTO CREDIT: Lisa Kohler
CONCERT REVIEW: Vox Vocal Ensemble (New York, NY)
SINGING TO MYSELF: Messin' Around
ASCENDIT DEUS: Music for Ascension Day
CONDUCTOR/COMPOSER INTERVIEW: Sanford Dole of Cantabile Chorale (Palo Alto, CA)
