San Francisco Choral Artists
San Francisco Choral Artists, directed by the dynamic Magen Solomon (in her 15th year at the podium), has just completed a local tour in honor of their silver anniversary, including a rare Marin County appearance at St. John's Church in Ross, that featured two engaging commissioned works that followed a jaunt through 20th century masterworks of the art, what composer-in-residence Brian Holmes whimsically called "a Golden Oldies show."
Not so much a jaunt after all, but a chronologically arranged trip through dense musical territory, some of it familiar only by analogy to many of its listeners. Starting with a vigorously bi-tonal Charles Ives Psalm 67, from the 1890s, though unpublished till 1939, the program progressed through a Webern piece from 1908, just before atonality, on to Debussy's medievalist Trois Chansons; Poulenc's intensive Lenten Motets; a kind of intermezzo with Gene Purling's arrangement of A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square; Hindemuth's wartime-composed Six Chansons, from Rilke; Elliott Carter's delightful setting of Emily Dickinson's Musicians Wrestle Everywhere; three of Britten's spirited Five Flower Songs (Evening Primrose from John Clare) and Vaughan Williams' Three Shakespeare Songs from 1951, the first, Full Fathom Five, from Ariel's mocking ditty in The Tempest, which has been called one of the great melopoeic verses in European prosody.
All of which laid the groundwork for a half-century leap to Christopher Marshall's The Big Moroccan Sea, commissioned by SFCA from a collaborator they've just named their first composer-not-in-residence, a New Zealander, by way of Samoa, now teaching in Florida.
Based on a news clipping, The Big Morocco Sea conveyed both immensity and intimacy, rendering that impersonal story transparent to the vast expanse of ocean and sky, out of which came the moving words of a nameless castaway (fine singing by tenor Devin Caughey) from a note left on a boat adrift over trackless waters. But this is no outcry in an empty abyss. In constant movement, with ceaseless, practically subliminal activity, the voices all around the soloist parse his story into syllable and sound, darkening then glistening, shifting with the currents, abruptly spiraling up as the wind and waves swell ... a unique and moving experience.
Brian Holmes, who teaches physics (and the physics of musical instruments) at San Jose State University, set Four e. e. cummings songs: in just, hist whist, when god lets my body be--and buffalo bill's ... certainly exhibiting, again, that whimsicality the composer of Fun With Dick And Jane (an opera) and Hums and Songs of Winnie The Pooh (a song cycle in German) freely banks on as his coin of the realm, as it were ... But as Magen Solomon pointed out, deeper, sometimes darker themes emerge. As the cummings poems do themselves, Holmes' settings rhythmically and harmonically play off old forms; by refreshing them, there's immediate insight into the world of childhood, to a folksy (and Halloweenish) awareness of evil--and byplay with a sense of mortality, both in nature and as a sidelong glance to what happens to the too-perfect hero, as in buffalo bill's: "jesus he was a beautiful man"--as an Asian American singer steps in for the blue-eyed impresario
of the Wild West Show, only to be quickly potted by a tall soprano with a toy carbine, the unfortunate hero-substitute sprawling across the pews as the choir intones the conclusion.
Keep an eye out in June for 25 by 25 by 25, Choral Artists' celebration of their 25 years, with a choir of 25, featuring 25 premieres they've made--new pieces by Brian Holmes and Christopher Marshall (something about a pork pie in Samoa ... )