BERKELEY—Launching its upcoming 25th season, the 55-voice chorus known as the Baroque Choral Guild heads off on an ambitious Italian tour next month, culminating in a concert at Venice’s fabled San Marco Cathedral.

The timing of the tour is perfect. Under Director Sanford Dole, now in his 3rd year, it sounds more like a cathedral choir, and not like the community chorus of old.

The BCG put a big chunk of its tour repertory on view in concerts of June 6–7.

Despite its name, the Mountain View-based a cappella ensemble is currently presenting living California composers with new pieces, in addition to European masters of the distant past.

Among the moderns, the biggest work was Kirke Mechem’s 20-minute trio of bird-related songs, Winging Wildly, which I found memorable. Most resonant of the three, ironically, was The Caged Bird, the one which Mechem admitted was the most problematic to set. In it his freeing up of his disciplined, polished style toward the nebulous realms of accidentals and chromaticism—following the predictable opening song’s soaring, sustained sounds of the kind in which he revels—have a haunting quality to match Paul Laurence Dunbar’s trenchant, blood-drenched bird-metaphor text on slavery.

Mechem, 78, is a San Franciscan of the lyric stage, best known for his opera Tartuffe played 270 times in seven countries, and still going strong. (Merci, Monsieur Moliere!)

The three world premieres were much shorter. In When I was on Horseback, Paul Crabtree produced a stamping, galumphing novelty chorus with the sounds and rhythms of a doomed soldier riding, with all the attendant theatrics and onomatopoeia.

Kurt Erickson’s Two Tennyson Settings thrived in contrasts, from a slow lament to a fast-stepping song of joy in five-beat patterns.

In his new Dance Steps, BCG Director Dole set a narrative text bringing preposterous notions and images to the bogged-down world of international diplomacy. Lying somewhere between political satire and the absurd, its heavy focus on text meanings was largely lost because of the inherent (un)intelligibility problem of choruses, even in as responsive a hall acoustically as Berkeley’s First Congregational Church, where the BCG was heard June 7.

Dole’s greatest contribution was not his composition but rather in how far he has brought the BCG toward vocal excellence. The voices are still undermanned, perticularly in the lowest registers. But when the BCG cleanly executes the elusive Bach Motet No. 2, The Spirit Assuages Our Infirmities, the Dole leadership factor is clearly a big asset.

©Paul Hertelendy 2003
artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music
Week of June 9–16, 2003
Vol. 5, No. 95

Paul Hertelendy has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish—and a certain amount of salsa—for years.

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