SFGC’s Highly Imaginative Holiday Concert

For the second year in a row, the annual holiday concert of the San Francisco Girls Chorus (SFGC) took place in cyberspace. Last year’s event, Island Holiday, was a relatively modest affair. Sean San José managed the comings and goings of the different choral and instrumental resources, and the results were captured on video by Joan Osato and New Art Media. For yesterday afternoon’s production, however, Taylor Joshua Rankin’s approaches to video were far more adventurous, combining familiar settings (including Davies Symphony Hall) with the imaginative products of video synthesis techniques. Taken as a whole, the diversity of those techniques was a bit overwhelming, often for the viewers and occasionally for the performers themselves; but by the end of the program the assets clearly outweighed the liabilities.

The full title of the program was Sprit of the Season: A Global Celebration of Baroque and Early Music, and the duration was roughly an hour. The program consisted of fifteen selections involving a generous range of durations. As always, the SFGC Premiere Ensemble, which performs all of the subscription programs, was joined by students at all levels of the Chorus School, from the Prep Chorus, through the Training Chorus, and up through the subsequent four levels of expertise. As in the past, those “on the way up” were joined by half a dozen SFGC alumnae. Within the Premiere Ensemble, there is also a Soloist Intensive division, which began the program with William Byrd’s “Lulla, Lullaby.”

In the past the “traditional” performances at Davies involved a fair amount of time for the different vocal groups to enter and leave the stage. Those prolonged interruptions occasionally tried the patience of the listener, but they could be accepted as necessary. Video afforded the opportunity for a more “streamlined” account of the program, as well as opportunities to transcend the limitations of the physical.

Readers may recall that, a year ago, Volti presented a video of a performance in which its sixteen vocalists were “socially distanced,” taking the affordances of Zoom technology as a point of departure. Rankin ramped up those affordances to “eleven” (thank you, Spinal Tap) with elaborate mosaics, often with stunning symmetries:

Screen shot of a performance by Chorus School students (from the YouTube video of the concert)

Now, to be fair, the  younger students clearly showed some difficulty in dealing with headsets and physical separation. However, as the level of performance skill advanced, so did the capacity for working with a wide diversity of video techniques.

Those techniques were particularly impressive when the Premier Ensemble joined forces with the program’s guest artist, violinist Edwin Huizinga. Performing in a church setting, the group presented an arrangement of the first section of the Ciaccona that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1004 solo violin partita in D minor, which was augmented with “chorale reconstructions” composed by Helga Thorne. The video for this selection was produced by Starr Sutherland with Atypical Project, and the synthesized images were positively mind-blowing.

The video experience, taken as a whole, may not have consistently risen to the standards of sophisticated technology coupled with excellent musical technique. However, there was no doubt that more than considerable imagination went into creating this video. Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe merits a vigorous shout-out for managing such an impressive enterprise and consistently holding the attention of viewers throughout the entire performance.