Pasa Reviews Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s “Venetian Splendor” and “Serenade to Music” concerts

Santa Fe Desert Chorale can be commended for having a precisely defined conception of its audience and crafting its programs and performances to meet those listeners’ expectations. As molded by Joshua Habermann, the group’s music director since 2009, its general aesthetic straddles the realms of the church choir and the collegiate chorus, though, if the latter, probably at a school with a well-regarded music program and an active religious affiliation. In fact, the Desert Chorale takes pains to emphasize its para-ecclesiastical nature. It performs almost exclusively in churches, and it stresses liturgical, sacred, or at least spiritual repertoire, which is not unnatural for an a-cappella chorus, though not inevitable, either. At performances, Habermann intersperses minutely prepared commentary in tones redolent of the Sunday school, ostensibly imparting historical background but also editing out parts that might ruffle the wholesomeness of the event. At the concerts’ end, the gladsome choristers march in a recessional down the aisle and gather just outside the exit, where they receive compliments from the departing audience members and thank them in return for attending. The churchly mien is not to the taste of all concertgoers, and a good many of our community’s music lovers have advised me that it stands as an impediment to their attending the group’s concerts. They are obviously not the target audience.

This season, the group’s 14 concerts are divided among four programs. The middle two involve subsets of the 24-member ensemble: eight singers for a program at Loretto Chapel titled “Venetian Splendor,” the other 16 for “Serenade to Music” at the Church of the Holy Faith. “Venetian Splendor” provides a center to its mission by focusing on repertoire written for, or at least published in, Venice during the late-16th and early-17th centuries. Monteverdi, the dominant musical genius of that time and place, is celebrated through five of the program’s 13 items, beginning with three five-voiced pieces from his Sixth Book of Madrigals (with some parts doubled). The acoustics of Loretto Chapel are characteristically challenging, and the choral blend was often marred by the outsize blaring of a first tenor.

Monteverdi’s renowned “Lamento della Ninfa” followed. It is an affecting scene constructed in a symmetrical arch: first a short introduction sung by three gentlemen, then the serpentine lament itself (where the fellows interject asides about the soprano’s tale of her faithless lover), and finally a concluding “motto,” perhaps 40 seconds long, again from the gentlemen. For reasons I cannot imagine, the concluding bit was omitted here, leaving the piece lopsided. If this unanticipated, even shocking alteration reflected some new musicological discovery, I wish Habermann had used his talking time to explain it. Elsewhere, Monteverdi’s famous ciaccona for two tenors “Zefiro torna” descended into a hurried display that one of the soloists approached as a shoutfest. A pair of choral works from the Venetian composers Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli received stirring renditions, the former’s “Ave Regina” grand and largely homophonic, the latter’s “Angelus Domini descendit” more complex in its contrapuntal working and accordingly more tangled in the space. The show ended with the charming, lighthearted “Festa Riso,” a balletto-like bonbon by Pietro Antonio Giramo, who worked in Naples rather than Venice, so it was strange to give him the final word. Continuo parts were entrusted to Baroque guitar players Richard Savino (who danced distractingly off to the side) and Candace Magner, as well as to Jan Worden-Lackey, whose electronic keyboard was unobtrusive if not quite historically accurate to Baroque standards in its construction.

The “Serenade to Music” program is devoted to English repertoire from a broad chronological span. Anthems and madrigals from the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were given in glee-club style, with several singers on each line. Part songs and choral movements from the 19th and 20th centuries (particularly Elgar’s “My Love Dwelleth in a Northern Land”) were elegantly served by the group’s lush timbre, which was conveyed richly but without mushiness in the nave of the Church of the Holy Faith. A good spirit inhabited some modal folk song settings by Holst. Diction was a bugbear; I don’t think I understood a single word in Britten’s “To Daffodils.” Especially praiseworthy was the group’s performance of “Lay a Garland,” composed in 1840 by Robert Pearsall as a latter-day madrigal of funerary import. Habermann shaped this exercise in drawn-out harmonic suspensions and resolutions into an involving stretch of neo-Handelian sublimity.

The program’s presumed anchor piece, Vaughan Williams’ Serenade to Music, was given with a piano accompaniment (with brief help from solo violin) that reminded one of how essential the plush orchestral writing is to the work’s effect. Based on a passage from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, the piece was doled out chunk by chunk without much care to shaping transitions. It incorporates solo passages for all the singers, who mostly did well in their spotlighted moments. It seemed nonetheless an essentially collegiate reading of a piece that is sometimes encountered in quite spectacular festival assemblages. The work’s premiere, in 1938, included such legendary British singers as Isobel Baillie, Eva Turner, Heddle Nash, and Roy Henderson. And what music lover would have wanted to miss the work when Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the 1962 opening of Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, later Avery Fisher Hall, now set to become David Geffen Hall? The chorus that night consisted of Adele Addison, Lucine Amara, Eileen Farrell, Lili Chookasian, Jennie Tourel, Shirley Verrett, Charles Bressler, Richard Tucker, Jon Vickers, George London, Ezio Flagello, and Donald Bell. A serenade to music, indeed! — James M. Keller

Santa Fe Desert Chorale’s summer concert series continues through Aug. 8th in Santa Fe and Aug. 9th in Albuquerque with “Venetian Splendor,” “Serenade to Music,” and “Hidden Treasures of Byzantium.” Tickets are available by calling 505-988-2282 or visiting www.desertchorale.org.