Cappella SF: Russian music in the rain

Under weeping skies last Sunday, looking out the train window at bare black branches or the occasional flurried clusters of dark green leaves tossing in the wind, I went into San Francisco to hear Cappella SF sing an all-Russian program at the Mission Dolores Basilica. It was obviously a day suited to a Russian mood.

I discovered at Cappella SF's last concert that the sound is very good in the back of the Basilica (near the entrance, that is), so that is where I planned on sitting. The doors were open already when I arrived a little before 4:30 for the 5:00 concert. I went in and then out the side to the men's room, which is right by the old Mission cemetery, which was padlocked for the night by then. I stared for a bit at the rain falling on the headstones under the trees, which is an enjoyably gloomy sensation.

Artistic Director Ragnar Bohlin had arranged a nicely varied program, with pleasing obscurities amid the more or less familiar beloveds. The sounds of the pieces themselves worked well together, making a program that was coherent but changeable enough to avoid monotony over the almost ninety minutes of the program. The sound of the chorus itself just seems to get better and better, with something clear and precise yet mellow about it, a sort of amber luster and clarity. The program started with some of the (to me, at least) obscurities. First up was Cherubic Hymn No. 7 by Dmitri Bortnyansky, who lived in the late eighteenth - early nineteenth centuries. He studied under Galuppi and spent a decade in Italy; I've heard some concerts the last few years of music from eighteenth-century Russia that make the case for a sort of European style that gradually gave way in the nineteenth century to national schools. Bortnyansky seems to straddle that divide with his hymn to the trinity. The next two composers, Pavel Chesnokov and Alexander Grechaninov, straddled a different divide, between Czarist Russia and the Soviet Union, but both their pieces (Salvation is created by the former and a wavelike setting of The Lord's Prayer by the latter) continued the religious theme and ethereal sound of the music.

The next piece was by a contemporary, Sergei Viluman, and though it was secular, a setting of Alexander Blok's poem Night, street, lamp, drugstore, the text and sound were so meditative and sombre and philosophical that it actually took me a while to realize that it wasn't an officially religious work. By now the rain was falling so heavily outside that it was clearly audible in the basilica, reinforcing the choir ("You die – and then relive it all, the same restart, the same repeat; the night, the ice on the canal, the drugstore, the lamp, the street. . . "). Rainfall is one of the few non-musician-caused noises that I can stand during a concert, a point that was brought home to me in the next section, when three youngish women who had come in late (possibly just to get out of the rain) sat in the pew behind me and proceeded to whisper, giggle, and loudly turn program pages during Schnittke's Psalms of Repentance (Nos. 1, 2, 11, and 12). That's the disadvantage of sitting in the back. You get people like that there: the latecomers, the whisperers, the phone-checkers. The mood was ruined, but fortunately they left after the Schittke. I moved farther back anyway. And I had really been looking forward to the Schnittke. I just can't comprehend people who can hear such music and not be moved to, at a minimum, a respectful silence.

There was a little break for the chorus before the final number; Bohlin played a prelude (Op 23, No 10 in G-flat) by Rachmaninov. The chorus then sang Nos. 1 - 8 of Rachmaninov's All-Night Vigil, with some lovely solos by mezzo-soprano Silvie Jensen and tenor Jimmy Kansau. The program notes promised some low basses here, and they came through, with that deep organ tone that sounds so essentially Russian, or so essentially like a certain conception of a certain Russia.

Cappella SF's next concert will be in May, again at the Basilica, but this time a concert of Norwegian music . As I said, their sound just keeps getting better, and this was a striking and moving concert (audience aside). Check out their next appearance (but please give a wide berth to the solitary man in black sitting in the back of the church!).

Cappella SF sings Songs for the Earth

Last Saturday night there were quite a few concerts to choose from – among them Ensemble Intercontemporain at Cal Performances at 8:00, Jennifer Koh and Shai Wosner at San Francisco Performances at 7:30, and Ragnar Bohlin leading Cappella SF at the Mission Dolores Basilica at 7:00 – so I went with the earliest start time and found myself walking around the basilica's block several times, waiting for the doors to open, which they did not do until 6:45. A considerable crowd had gathered in the chilly dark by then, so I waited off to the side until the line was what I considered manageable, with the result that the front part of the church was full by the time I made it in. The usher was having such a wonderful time teasing someone in front of me that he was unable either to hand me a program or even let me pass. I managed to grab a program while he was mid-josh and semi-shove my way through, as politely as I could. Given the late hour at which they opened the doors, I wasn't really up for tomfoolery. I was also in even less of a mood than usual for sitting in a crowd, so I kept moving back as latecomers wandered in (as they continued to do even after the concert started), until finally I found myself almost all the way in the back of the nave, with a safe number of pews between me and anyone else.

This turned out to be an excellent spot from which to hear the chorus. The last time I heard Cappella SF was also in Mission Dolores Basilica, only I was much closer, off to the side near the transept, and the sound arrived there a bit muddied. From where I sat on Saturday the sound came through in clear and well-shaped form.

The theme of the concert, presented in collaboration with Food & Water Watch, was Songs for the Earth: Music and Reflections on Protecting Nature. It did occur to me fairly late in the game that the "reflections" mentioned in the subtitle would take the form of readings during the performance, and indeed between each number a member of Food & Water Watch would read a brief comment. These were mostly well chosen, though personally I would have preferred more in the way of philosophy and poetry rather than politicians (more Thoreau and Wordsworth, fewer congressional representatives, in other words). I guess the idea was to remind us that political solutions are essential for some of the larger problems, but by concert's end, when I saw several people rudely holding up their glowing phones to get a shaky and inadequate video of the group singing, which reminded me of an article I read recently pointing out that Steve Jobs's major contribution to our world will most likely be piles of toxic waste dumps full of instantly outmoded phones, I wondered how deeply the message of ecological urgency is penetrating to any of us. Given Big Tech's clout around these parts, and the adulation that industry tends to receive, I wonder how many people concerned with things like unfair working conditions, the surveillance state, income disparity, and strip-mining the earth for products we dump after a year would be willing to resist the latest "innovation," or at least hang on to their instantly outmoded phones for a cycle or two. I suppose all of us end up having to deal with our own preferences and ironies when it comes to our individual attempts to solve a massive world-wide problem.

The music itself was more abstract than the readings, tending towards contemplation and celebration of nature and natural cycles. The first piece was by Jan Sandström, a contemporary Swedish composer, who adapted a traditional Sami (Laplander) song to the wind. Tenor soloist Ben Jones sang and the chorus followed, with a drum beating softly with the murmuring sounds. That was followed by the world premiere of Madrigals for the Season by David Conte. There will be a song for each season, but on Saturday we heard two, Summer and Autumn (I couldn't quite tell from the program note if Winter and Spring had been composed yet). Summer was a setting of Dickinson's A Summer's Day and Autumn was John Clare's Autumn (The summer-flower has run to seed). Both settings were very appealing but, especially given the composer's note on his vivid memories of sharply differentiated seasons during his Midwestern childhood, they were a bit too much alike. Dickinson and Clare both write about Nature but don't really sound in the same world. I did feel that the concert as a whole could have used a few more radical contrasts. So the third piece, Monteverdi's setting of Tasso's Ecco mormorar l'onde (Now the waves murmur) offered a welcome tang.

Then we heard Stjernespejl (The star rises on the horizon) by contemporary Danish composer Per Nørgård, followed by Swedish composer David Wikander's Kung Liljekonjalje (King Lily-of-the-Valley), and then Estonian composer Veljo Tormis's Sugismaastikud, a setting of seven short movements presenting autumn vignettes. I assume the welcome programming of unfamiliar Danish and Scandinavian composers reflects the interests of artistic director Bohlin. That was followed by Stanford's The Blue Bird and Vaughn Williams's Three Shakespeare Songs. These were all lovely, contemplative numbers, nicely delineated by the chorus. The final two selections were Frank Tichell's Earth Song, to the composer's own text, based on a heartfelt longing for peace amid our misadventures in Iraq, and Eric Whitacre's Cloudburst, which has the chorus snapping their fingers to recreate the sound of falling rain, a sound we have have sadly lost familiarity with during these drought years.

The concert was about ninety minutes with no intermission. The darkened basilica was a nice venue for its contemplative essence, despite the occasional intrusion of glowing screens mentioned earlier. There was a reception afterwards in the parish hall. I slipped in just long enough to grab some cheese-biscuits, say hello to a singer or two that I know, and buy Cappella SF's new Christmas album, Light of Gold, which I may write about if I find the time. Cappella SF's next concert, again at Mission Dolores Basilica, will be a celebration of Russian choral music, on 17 January 2016.

in which I am a sacred choral music stud

Several Sundays ago I attended two concerts in a row of sacred choral music (some of it officially sacred, all of it sanctified): Magnificat with Schütz's Opus Ultimum at St Mark's Lutheran at 4:00 PM and then, skipping the Magnificat après-concert reception and rushing across the street to the Cathedral, Cappella SF at 6:00 PM with a program called Autumn Light, progressing, as my favorite season does, from the last bright glow of summer to the somber inward reflectiveness of on-coming winter. Altogether that was about three hours of (like an old-school Puritan) sitting on hard pews and paying attention to the divine words. But to hear unified human voices, on what started out as a hot and miserable day, conducting us (as Virgil did Dante) into a sacred realm. . . It was well worth the sore behind and the rushing and the worrying about time and the cost of the tickets. When I left the second concert, there was a cool and blessed wind blowing, and the day's heat and aggravations had, if not vanished, moved somewhere else.

Schütz's Opus Ultimum is also known as Der Schwanengesang: that is, his swan song, his last work before death took him. It is a setting for double chorus of the epic Psalm 119, the longest of the Psalms, an elaborate acrostic in the original Hebrew. The composer asked one of his Dresden colleagues, Constantin Christian Dedekind, to add the instrumentation, but instead Dedekind wrote his own setting. So Magnificat's artistic director, Warren Stewart, stepped in over the centuries to aid Schütz.

In his talk beforehand, Stewart discussed feeling somewhat stymied at the task, until a German colleague of his said, "Well, this is how you'll do it this time!" – with the implication that there will be another time, another opportunity. This sense of the provisional can be oddly freeing. Stewart did a beautiful job, and his introductory talk gave some helpful guides for listening, and as a result the concluding doxology of each section (Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost, As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end, Amen) sounded like the guide and blessing it was meant to be.

Magnificat used one voice per part, and the words came through in a clear and meaningful way, with passionate, committed declamation. The sun burned through the windows as we started, and was declining by the end. It was hot in the church, and paying sustained attention can be exhausting, but there was a sustained and enthusiastic burst of applause at the end. There was a reception afterwards in the lower level of the church, but instead I rushed across the street to the cathedral to buy a ticket for another concert (I had actually not bought tickets for either concert in advance, not sure if I would be able to get to either one).

It turned out I was there in a good amount of time, so I sat in the cathedral, which I haven't been to in a while, just gathering my thoughts. We, the audience for Cappella SF, were in only one section of the arrayed pews, and I vaguely thought about going over to one of the far corners of the church where I could let the sound wash over me in delightful and splendid isolation. But I stayed where I was, figuring that the baffles behind the chorus indicated that the sound would be best if I stayed put, on the aisle in my pew. For Magnificat I had sat up close. That may account for the dramatic vividness of the one sound and the more blended sound of the other. There was interesting variety in the different sounds, each enticing in its own way.

Ragnar Bohlin, the conductor of the redoubtable San Francisco Symphony Chorus, is the artistic director of Cappella SF. His interesting and well-chosen selections were mostly from northern parts; we started with Bach's Singet Dem Herren, followed by Josef Rheinberger's Mass in E-Flat Major, Op 109, Ingavr Lidholm's De Profundis (an interesting mixture of the old prayer with texts by Strindberg), Arvo Pärt's Sieben Magnificat Antiphonen, and concluding with the solemn thoughts of Schnittke's Psalms of Repentance, No. XI and XII.

There was a reception after this concert, too, and since I had no where in particular to go (and was by then both hungry and thirsty, though only physically) I went to this one. I had no idea that below the cathedral was a honeycomb of meeting rooms, though they're in a disappointingly mundane style: down there it seemed not like a catacomb but like a Holiday Inn badly in need of updating. I found the room where the reception was held, and gratefully grabbed some cookies and cheese straws and a glass of wine before I realized that there would be a series of speeches, at which point, having waved to the singers I knew in the chorus, I slipped out into the blessedly cooling dusk. When I was younger I did not hesitate to attend two concerts in a day, but I have less stamina now, and less patience. But this seemed like a special opportunity, and I was glad I took it.

Magnificat's next concert is 19 - 21 December, and they will be performing Cavalli's Christmas Mass in various venues; check here for details. Cappella SF's next concert will be 6 February 2015 at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and will feature music by Conrad Susa and David Conte; check their website here for more information.