Last night the San Francisco Gay Men’s Chorus (SFGMC) returned to Davies Symphony Hall to perform their third annual concert. A reduced ensemble of San Francisco Symphony performers was joined by pianist Danny Sullivan. The conductor was SFGMC Artistic Director Jacob Stensberg, also serving as Master of Ceremonies to introduce the works on the program, whose title was All We Need Is Love.
I was a bit surprised that the program did not include the selection with the name of the entire performance. However, there was so much rich content being performed that I could not quibble over such a minor factor. That diversity was reflected by the fact that only three of the composers on the program were familiar to me. Curiously, these were the first three selections on the program.
This began with the second movement from David Conte’s “Elegy for Matthew Shepard.” The text by John Stirling Walker reflected on the death of the 21-year old student at the University of Wyoming, who was beaten, tortured, and left to die for his sexual orientation. Text sheets were not included with the program, but the clarity of the vocal delivery could not have been better. (There were also American Sign Language interpreters at the front-right corner of the stage.) This was followed by the oldest work on the program, the cycle by Ralph Vaughan Williams entitled Five Mystical Songs. The last familiar composer was Michael Tilson Thomas (present for the occasion), whose “I’d Like to Learn” was given a choral arrangement by Nicolas Perez. In addition, the first half of the program concluded with the world premiere performance of “The Promise that Tomorrow Holds Today,” composed by Dominick DiOrio setting his own text.
The biggest surprise for me during the second half of the program was the discovery that “My Way,” best known by its 1969 recording by Frank Sinatra, was not an original tune. The music began as a ballad by French composer Jacques Revaux, who later reworked it with Claude François into “Comme d’habitude” (as usual), which made the top of the French pop chart in February of 1968. It was subsequently given an English version by Paul Anka with the title “My Way;” and the rest, as they say, is history. However, SFGMC turned back the clock to deliver a choral version of “Comme d’habitude” in an arrangement by Saunder Choi.
The members of The Lollipop Guild in an urban setting (from an SFGMC Web page)
The second half of the program also featured selections performed by two smaller ensembles of chorus members. The smaller of these was HomoPhonics, which presented “Elastic Heart,” the only work on the program with accompaniment from a beat box. Somewhat larger was The Lollipop Guild with Music Director Paul Saccone, which performed Aled Phillips’ arrangement of “Biblical,” a single recorded by Calum Scott that seems to have been composed by a committee.
The other high point of the second half was a partnership with the San Francisco Bay Area Theatre Company with semi-staged direction by Rodney Earl Jackson Jr. and choreography by Christine Chung. The music was “I, Too, Sing America,” composed by Othello Jefferson, whose own texts were combined with those of Langston Hughes. This was clearly the most elaborate undertaking of the evening, making the best of the limited space available for performance.
Taken as a whole, the program was an ambitious undertaking; but it was thoroughly engaging from beginning to end.
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