Last night Davies Symphony Hall hosted the annual seasonal concert presented by the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) and its Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe. This is the major occasion when almost all of the SFGC resources share the performing space, and Davies is one of the few venues to provide enough volume to contain them all. Thus, in addition to the Premiere Ensemble (and its embedded Chamber Ensemble), which performs the concerts for the annual subscription series, the many different levels of the SFGC School, all the way from the youngest in the Prep Chorus to the most advanced in Level IV, also contribute to the overall program.
Benjamin Britten, honored last night by SFGC (from a publicity photograph for London Records, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
However, that was not all, folks (as P. T. Barnum would have put it)! The title of the program was A Ceremony of Carols, which was also the title of the principal work on the program, composed by Benjamin Britten and scored for three-part treble chorus and harp. The harpist for the evening was Bridget Kibbey. Keyboard accompaniment, when it was necessary, was provided by Robert Huw Morgan at the organ and three alternating pianists, Susan Binderman, Othello Jefferson, and Taylor Chan. The Living Earth Show (TLES) duo of guitarist Travis Andrews and percussionist Andy Meyerson were also on hand (making their Davies debut), as were eight of the vocalists of Clerestory. Finally, Céline Ricci served as Stage Director for the entire production, not only managing the comings and goings of the many different performing groups but also enhancing several of the selections with choreography performed by the choristers.
In other words this was an evening in which quantity prevailed. Nevertheless, this was quantity with considerable breadth; and, thanks to Ricci’s acute command of the overall flow of resources, there was never a sense that all of that abundance was dragging along at too slow a pace. Still, there were a few disappointments, which, in the volume of the overall scope, were probably inevitable.
Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols (his Opus 28) is flexible in the resources required. However, because there is an almost naive simplicity to the texts, those resources tend to be kept to an intimate scale. There is also a sense of ritual in the use of a Gregorian antiphon for Procession and Recession movements that frame the carols themselves. As a result, the overall rhetoric is more suited to the scale of the Church of the Advent of Christ the King (a few blocks to the west of Davies) than it is to the magnitude of the Davies scale. Thus, last night’s performance presented an arrangement of Britten’s score by Julius Harrison that basically “amped-up” the original version. That included adding harp accompaniment to the plainchant antiphons and having multiple voices sing passages originally intended as solos. Fortunately, however, Harrison kept most of his tinkering on the surface. As a result, the light shone on Britten may have departed from the original vision; but the music itself was never seriously compromised.
On the other hand the remainder of the program flowed by with a rapidity that tended to keep individual selections from leaving a particularly deep impression. Nevertheless, the use of resonating wine glasses (played by the singers themselves) to evoke the sound of a glass harmonica in the opening selection, “Stars” by Ēriks Ešenvalds, had such a profound impact that one was barely aware of the words being sung. There was also a rather reassuring nod to Davies itself in beginning the second half of the program with Esa-Pekka Salonen’s “Dona Nobis Pacem.”
Then, of course, TLES was on hand to make sure we did not take anything too seriously. They performed one of their most delightful “standards,” Nicole Lizée’s “Family Sing-A-Long.” This involved Andrews strumming his guitar while encouraging the audience to sing “Michael, row your boat ashore” (whose words were included in the program book along with all of the other song texts). However, when the tune came to “Hallelujah!,” the “lu” syllable was sustained to allow Meyerson to go wild on his drum kit. Each time the tune was repeated, the “lu” took on longer and longer durations, beyond the limits of just about any human breath. Fortunately, most of the audience seemed happy enough to play long with the joke (with at least one improviser up in the Second Tier). I suspect that having Lizée’s piece precede the usual audience sing-along carol selection was no mere coincidence.
No comments:
Post a Comment