Some major moments of magical choral work
Like any self-respecting newmusic ensemble, the choral group Roomful of Teeth has a host of unorthodox performing techniques at its command. The eight members can whoop and wail, mumble and whisper, sing from their throats and heads and everywhere in between.
But the group’s signature stroke — one that recurred repeatedly during Roomful’s dazzling local debut on Sunday, April 23 — is one of the oldest tricks in the choral arsenal. That’s a full-throated, top-tobottom, perfectly tuned major chord, the kind that sets overtones bouncing around the room and little chills of pleasure running up your spine.
When one of those harmonies hits, especially in the midst of something more eclectic or elusive, it’s like a sudden burst of absolute radiance. Everything snaps into focus, the sound gets crisp and clear, the singers lean ever so slightly into their microphones, and suddenly all is right with the world. It’s an effect that by rights should register as cloying or sentimental, but it never does.
Sunday’s all-too-brief performance at the Taube Atrium Theater was a co-presentation as part of San Francisco Performances’ Pivot Series and SF Opera Lab, and it offered an overdue chance to experience this group’s vocal magic in a live setting. Roomful of Teeth, formed in 2009 by Artistic Director Brad Wells, gathers each year in North Adams, Mass., and for many listeners, the group first swam into view four years ago, when Caroline Shaw’s “Partita for 8 Voices” — composed for the ensemble by one of its members — was a surprise winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
That piece, a 25-minute marvel of sustained inventiveness and exuberance, occupied the program’s first half, and it could scarcely have provided a more apt exposition of the ensemble’s distinctive sound world. Its four movements, each one loosely inspired by a Baroque dance form, are built out of abstract materials arrayed in intricately patterned textures.
A funky rhythmic etude materializes from sharp, percussive indrawn breaths. A sweettoned, wordless choral hymn starts up, blurs and regroups. A repeated melodic motif is shaped into an arabesque by the singers’ balletic head feints toward and away from the microphone. Spoken sentences crumble before our ears.
Throughout it all, those beatific major chords keep recurring, to serve as structural anchors as if in some long stretch of Renaissance polyphony. The effect every time is both reassuring (“don’t worry, we haven’t lost the thread”) and thrillingly anticipatory (“we’ll take a breath for a second, and then wait until you hear what we’ve got cued up next”).
“Partita” is an expression of pure joy, in all its manifestations, and you could feel that on either side of the nonexistent footlights. The singers, though they were obviously concentrating hard, spent much of the performance grinning like happy idiots; the audience likewise.
After intermission came a trio of Shakespeare settings, interestingly varied but never quite as electrifying as “Partita.” In “The Isle,” Shaw turns a series of excerpts from “The Tempest” into music that is alternately shadowy and rhetorically straightforward — her own melismatic solo, delivering lines of Caliban, emerged as the work’s most telling passage.
Another member of the ensemble, Eric Dudley, contributed “QuietUs,” a meditation on “Hamlet” built out of a single distinctive melodic gesture clothed in ever-shifting counterpoint, and Anna Clyne’s “Pocket Book” put a pair of sonnets to work enlivening a limited harmonic palette.