SA Chamber Choir:
Enlarging the space of music
April 7, 2008Much of the San Antonio Chamber Choir's concert April 6 in St. Luke's Episcopal Church comprised recent works that gently stretched the ear and enlarged the space of music. It was not a difficult or offputting program for the audience -- all the surprises were pleasant ones -- but it put daunting and nearly unremitting challenges in front of the singers. Rebounding from an uncharacteristic state of disrepair last fall, the troupe was generally up to the task, though intonation and ensemble fell a little short of the highest standard. The conductor was Scott MacPherson, who founded this 26-voice professional choir two years ago.
Two of the most enticing pieces came from Canada. In R. Murray Shafer's kaleidophonic "Epitaph for Moonlight," whose text consists of words invented by children to evoke moonlight, thick chords dripping with color narrow to a knife edge and spread again with new colors. Stephen Chatman, born in the U.S. but long a resident of Vancouver, mined sound efffects and the clustering or wavelike repetition of words to create perfect little pictures of mountains, trees, woodpeckers, thrushes and mosquitoes in "Due North: Five Songs of Nature."
The program held the first performance of a piece the choir commissioned from Mexican composer Juan Luis de Pablo Enriquez Rohen, who was born in 1978 and earned his undergraduate degree from Trinity University. Enriquez's "Xoctlamique Nuxochiltzin -- Ah, tlamiz noxochiuh" is a setting of a poem, about eternal life, attributed (dubiously) to Nezahualcoyatl. The first half, sung in the modern version of the Nahuatl language, proceeds as a stately sequence of boldly colored, organlilke chords, with shading from a piano and string bass and a repeating figure on bass drum. The second half, sung in classical Nahuatl, is much more animated but less otherworldly.
Two very recent works by American composer Andrew Rindfleisch incorporate cascading layers of sound, jazzlike modern harmonies and fleeting allusions to the music of past centuries. His "Careless Carols" (2007) is a rhythmically complex, ecstatic setting of a poem by Rabindranath Tagore. "Veni, Sancte Spiritus" (2005) is peaceful and radiant. MacPherson paied two very different works set to texts from II Samuel -- Norman Dinerstein's "When David Heard," a conservative modernist essay on inconsolable grief, and Randall Thompson's plain-spoken "The Last Words of David."
A quartet from the choir offered John Cage's "Story," spoken in overlapping cyclical rhythms that emulate the sense of the brief text by Gertrude Stein: "Once upon a time the world was round and you could go on it around and around."
A set of folksong settings included Michael Hennagin's delicious reimagining of "La Cucaracha," Moses Hogan's complex, textured arrangement of "Elijah Rock" and Robert Fountain's respectful treatment of "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," with Mary Cowart's bright, powerful, hornlike alto solo.
Mike
Greenberg
