Cantabile Review: June 2005 San Francisco Classical Voice

Time Mix

June 6, 2005

It was easy to see Sunday night why the 25-year-old Baroque Choral Guild has changed its name to Cantabile Choral Guild. At St. John's Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, they sang three works: two from the 20th Century by William Ludtke and Libby Larsen and one from the 16th. Conducting with a sure hand, Sanford Dole presented a program of music for chorus, brass, percussion and piano which was imaginatively programmed and well performed by Cantabile with musicians from the California Symphony.

Giovanni Gabrieli's Magnificat for three choruses came first, one chorus at each side of the space and the rest up on the stage. The familiar rising third of the ancient Magnificat chant initiated the concert, sung with full rich sound by Cantabile's second altos, accompanied by horn and trombones. It was a treat to be surrounded, Gabrieli-fashion, by choruses in stereo.

Born 400 years after Gabrieli, Minnesota composer Libby Larsen also wrote for chorus and brass. An interesting feature of the concert was the varied use of the instrumental forces by the three composers. Gabrieli combined one a cappella chorus with two choruses incorporating instruments as voices, Ludtke added percussion and piano, and Larsen made the instrumental parts even more distinct, with material that contrasted with the vocal parts.

A potpourri

Larsen's Seven Ghosts is a celebration of the lives and words of a series of people important to American history — freed slave Phillis Wheatley dedicating a poem to George Washington; Jenny Lind writing to Harriet Beecher Stowe; Clyde Tombaugh describing how he discovered the planet Pluto; Charles Lindbergh celebrating flight; Louis Armstrong feeling pretty good about his high C's. "Grace and Glory" begins with a reading of Wheatley's letter offering her poem to Washington. The poem was sung to perky trumpet and drum accompaniment, evocative of early American marches and war songs. Jenny Lind often sang Home, Sweet Home on her American tour, and the song was woven into the text of her letter to Stowe supporting the abolitionist sentiments of "Uncle Tom's Cabin."

" Blinking Pluto" describes the process which led to the discovery of Pluto, blinking among the stars. The song begins with wordless singing, goes on to create the sense of repetitive work searching among thousands of stars, and ends with a wonderful "aha" moment: "I spied an object popping in and out. That's it!" "Myself with Wings" is an inscription taken from a statue of Charles Lindbergh, and features long swooping phrases piled up in a counterpoint of flight. "United Hot Clubs of America" starts with a reading from Louis Armstrong's autobiography and continues with wordless scat singing. The chorus got into the swing of it pretty well; there were some marching eighth notes that could have swung more. If French Baroque music and jazz can swing, so can Libby Larsen. The concert ended with a bang — a blat on trumpet and a forest of waving hands.
Cantabile sang the Larsen songs with evident enjoyment and stylish panache, and solo singers and readers from the chorus made fine contributions. Especially worthy of mention were soprano Anne Goess, alto Ruthann Lovetang and speaker Irene Lawrence.

An enhanced work

Bay Area composer William Ludtke's Mass, opus 91, the centerpiece of the program, is a bit of a hybrid. Nearly twenty years ago it was a Latin Missa Brevis (sans "Credo") commissioned by the Baroque Choral Guild. By a later performance Ludtke had added, between the "Gloria" and the "Sanctus," a "Pie Jesu," a quotation from Revelation and a chorale setting of a 17th-century poem by Henry Vaughan. A "Pater Noster" separates the "Sanctus" and the "Agnus Dei. "

Ludtke's mÈlange of compositional styles marks the work as a 20th-century piece and poses significant challenges both to the audience and to a chorus for which it was largely unfamiliar after years of turnover. The opening "Kyrie" is chant-based, unlike the rather formless instrumental prelude which precedes it. The "Gloria" is dissonant and dense, building up layers of sound. The instruments play an attractive introduction to "Pie Jesu" and then leave the chorus to an a cappella rendition of their most difficult movement, contrapuntal at very close intervals. The "Pie Jesu" is a beautiful, haunting piece, and the singers did reasonably by it, but it may take them another twenty years to sing it with conviction and razor-sharp tuning.

" Et Vidi Coelum Novum" (I saw a new Heaven and a new Earth) is the movement from the Biblical book of Revelation. The brass section is back, augmented by timpani. The chorus is led at intervals by a tenor solo, sung with assurance and carrying power by Kevin Gibbs. Dynamic balances were well judged and well executed. The relatively tonal a cappella "Chorale" followed, sung expressively in English. Ludtke's "Sanctus," led off by a peppy brass movement, is more chirpy than holy, resulting in a lack of contrast between the "Sanctus" and the "Hosanna." The piano part, well played throughout by T. Paul Rosas, is highlighted in the "Pater Noster," and again the chorus made effective use of dynamic contrasts. There were some tuning issues between brass and chorus in the "Agnus Dei," but not enough to mar the ending.

(Anna Carol Dudley is a singer, teacher, member of the faculties of the University of California, Berkeley, and San Francisco State University lecturer emerita] and director emerita of the San Francisco Early Music Society's Baroque Music Workshop.)

Cantabile Choral Guild
953 Industrial Avenue, Suite 122, Palo Alto CA 94303
650.424.1410 info@cantabile.org