Chanticleer Celebrates its Home Town

Photograph of Chanticleer taken in 2014 (from Wikimedia Commons, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

This afternoon the all-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer brought the third of the four programs prepared for its current (48th) season to the Caroline H. Hume Concert Hall of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. The title of that program was I Left My Heart in San Francisco; and the program featured a diversity of Bay Area composers past and present, many of whom came to San Francisco and decided to stay. Unless I am mistaken, all of the composers contributing to the program were based in the Bay Area during the last and present centuries.

The program was as abundant as it was diverse, and it was performed without an intermission. In reviewing the program book, I was a bit skeptical about this being more of a strain than the audience would tolerate. However, the individual selections proceeded at a rapid clip; and I suspect that, like most of the audience, I never felt a need for a break to stretch my legs (or for any other good reason). By the same count, I never felt that the abundant program prepared for the occasion would overstay its welcome. Indeed, the diversity of the selections themselves was sufficient to sustain my attention over the course of a performance lasting about 100 minutes.

That said, I have to confess that, having just left the venue, none of those selections (except for the “title song”) had an effect on memory strong enough for me to advocate listening to it again! This may be part of the Chanticleer aesthetic. What matters is diversity, and the abundance of that diversity carries the attentive listener from one setting to another without ever worrying about an onset of fatigue. As I now sit reviewing the full two-page list of works performed, I realize that no one of those offerings rises above the others. In other words the “Chanticleer aesthetic” is about the entire journey, rather than any of the stops along the way!

Whatever my personal thoughts about that aesthetic may be, I always finding myself looking forward to the next performance!