Back to Nature with San Francisco Choral Artists

 

The San Francisco Choral Artists vocalists with Artistic Director Magen Solomon front and center

The full title of the final program of the season to be presented by San Francisco Choral Artists was Birds & Bees & Dirty Knees: A Garden Tribute. This was structured into a series of six “episodes” reflecting on that title:

1. Venturing Outside
2. Spring!
3. Evening/Night
4. On the Water
5. In the Woods
6. With the Birds

The program consisted of 21 pieces. These included world premiere performances by Composer in-Residence Eric Tuan (a five-movement suite entitled Tule Lake Sketches), Composer Not-in-Residence  Balázs Kecskés D. (“Éjszaka,” which is Hungarian for “night”),  New Voices Project competition winner Jonathan Mitchell (“The Homing Bee”), and “old friend” Wayne Eastwood (“To Make a Prairie”).

All this may strike the reader as intimidating quantity. However, the program breezed by without an intermission for a total duration of about 90 minutes. Much of that impression was probably due to the skill with which Artistic Director Magen Solomon arranged all of those pieces. Each selection contrasted with its predecessor, producing a freshness of encounters that flowed by without ever leaving any sense of (as Winston Churchill put it) “one damned thing after another!”

Mind you, my responses to this flow varied from one piece to the next. The fact is that, where text is concerned, I have cultivated a strong belief that both words and music should honor not only clarity of semantics but also the expressiveness of rhetoric. Granting that this is a relatively high bar, I can acknowledge that there were definitely composers on the program that did not honor my belief! Rather than single them out, however, I would prefer to dwell on the episodes that particularly satisfied.

One of these was the oldest work on the program, “El Grillo” (the cricket), a frottola by Josquin des Prez. Josquin tends to be known best as a composer of sacred music with particular attention to Mass settings. However, he had a secular side represented by an engaging diversity of polyphonic chansons. I wrote about these contrasting sides back in September of 2021 after harmonia mundi marked the 500th anniversary of his death with the release of a three-CD set entitled The Renaissance Master: Sacred music and Chansons. Those willing to consult the Wikipedia page for “El Grillo” will discover any number of ways to have fun with this little gem.

On the more recent side I was particularly struck by Conrad Susa’s “Landscape II.” This was a setting of Will Kirkland’s translation of a text by Federico García Lorca. It consists of only six sentences, but each is rich in semantic expressiveness. Susa seems to have grasped the full semantic spectrum of the text and reflected it in the music he composed.

Readers probably also know that I cannot get enough of the music of Johannes Brahms. I remember some of his choral works from my high school days, but it was only after Deutsche Grammophon released a collection of his complete choral works that I began to get hooked. Yesterday afternoon’s selection was “Es geht ein Wehen” (a sighing breeze), a setting of a text by Paul Heyse, rich in dark dispositions all collected into only two stanzas. That gem would have been “worth the price of admission” (with a nod to P. T. Barnum) for the entire afternoon!