Chanticleer gives voice to variety

B> BY ALEXANDER VARTY

ased as he is in Atlanta, Georgia, William Fred Scott understandably wants to know how the weekly magazine calling him from Vancouver, British Columbia, got its name. And readers of said weekly could also be forgiven for needing him to explain just what, exactly, the Bay Area–based men’s choir he leads is all about.

Chanticleer, which celebrates its 40th anniversary next year, has an astonishingly diverse repertoire: its 25 CDS encompass the music of the Mexican baroque, a 70-minute liturgical drama penned by the late British composer John Tavener, interpretations of jazz and indie-rock songs, and five Christmas-themed collections.

But when the 12-member ensemble first came together, it had a much simpler mandate. “It was formed 40 years ago out of a group of singers who had sung at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco,” Scott tells the Georgia Straight in a telephone interview from his Peach State home. “These guys got together literally around a kitchen table, because they felt like they would like to try singing Renaissance music in a Renaissance way.”

Early music is still a part of every Chanticleer concert, Scott assures us, and that was one of the things that led him to sign up as the ensemble’s music director three years ago.

“That was great, musically interesting material for me, because I didn’t know a lot of this Renaissance choral material,” says Scott, a veteran of both the Atlanta Opera and the Atlanta Symphony who commutes cross-country to rehearse with his singers. “But it’s not just Renaissance, and it’s not just sacred.…chanticleer has a great sound for jazz and for the African-american spiritual, as well as for Romantic 19th-century music. So if we have a mission statement at all, it’s that we are an all-male ensemble, without a conductor, singing soprano through bass.

“We have a kind of specialty in Renaissance music because it’s in our DNA,” he continues. “But we also have a great feeling for the importance of commissioning new choral works, and so we have, if you will, a legacy of literally hundreds of commissions that have been written for us.”

One of those, Jaakko Mäntyjärvi’s Hommage à Edith, is the centrepiece of Chanticleer’s latest recording, My Secret Heart, and it plays a similar role in the concert of the same name that Chanticleer will present as part of Chor Leoni’s upcoming Van/man Male Choral Summit.

“He seems to know exactly how to write for us,” Scott says of the Finnish choral innovator. “He makes a really beautiful kind of moody, Nordic, intense sonority, but every note seems to be just the right note for what we can do in terms of breathing and dynamics and phrasing.”

In part, that’s because Mäntyjärvi pays careful attention to what male singers can and cannot do. “Male sopranos can never sing as high, consistently, as female sopranos can,” Scott notes. “So a composer cannot write a string of high Cs, let’s say, for the soprano voice. If they had a big choir with females in it, they could probably get away with that, but our group of 12 would never be able to sing, you know, the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, with all those B-flats and B naturals. It’s just too difficult for the male sopranos to live up there.

“Other than that, though, the sky’s the limit.”