Chicago Classical Review

Roomful of Teeth is not your ordinary vocal ensemble. And they were keen to make Friday night’s concert at the Logan Center—the opening event of the University of Chicago Presents’ season—not your usual classical concert.

They came dressed in informal clothing. Artistic director Cameron Beauchamp avoided classical language, calling each piece a “tune” and their program a “set.” He ably worked the crowd with as many gratuitous references to and compliments about Chicago as possible. He plugged all of the ensemble member’s side hustles.

And like a rock band, Roomful of Teeth devoted all of the program except for one song to pieces they premiered and/or recorded. The concert was an opportunity to experience some of their greatest hits live.

In that spirit, they opened with two movements from their signature piece: Caroline Shaw’s Pulitzer-winning Partita for 8 Voices. Besides being an excellent work in its own right, the Partita also served as a nice sampler of Roomful of Teeth’s virtues: the ability of each singer to display a distinctive and unique timbre when speaking or solo-singing, but to blend seamlessly in ensemble passages when required. They also exercised a degree of dynamic control over the voices often achievable only by a mixing board.

Of course, there was an actual mixing board at play too. Besides the eight singers on stage, the ninth performer in the concert was audio engineer Randall Squires, manipulating the palette of amplification and reverb effects, as well as playing prerecorded instrumentals for some of the pieces. But it is a testament to the singers’ control that it was frequently difficult to tell how much of each effect was due to them versus the engineering.

One member of the ensemble, Jodie Landau, played a larger role than the others. He conducted some of the more complex pieces, such as Angélica Negrón’s “math, the one which is sweet” and Judd Greenstein’s Montmartre. He played percussion during the two selections from Wally Gunn’s The Ascendant at the same time as singing an alto part, having only sung a tenor part before. And he was the main soloist on two other songs, Judd Greenstein’s Run Away and Robin Pecknold’s Helplessness Blues, flexibly adapting his timbre to the very different styles of these pieces.

Pecknold’s song, in particular, was a break from the rest of the program, as the only song originally written for another ensemble: in this case, Fleet of Foxes. It was sung by only three of the vocalists—Landau, Mingjia Chen, and Steven Bradshaw—instead of all eight. And Pecknold’s song was free of the extended techniques that ran throughout the other pieces. It was a testament to the trio’s ability to sing old-fashioned three-part harmony just as well as they sing avant-garde music.

The Pecknold song also helped them dodge the only potential danger with this kind of concert: that the bag of tricks employed across the various pieces—such as the frequent use of Inuit and Tuvan throat singing—would feel stale by the end.

Their ordering of the pieces also helped. In the first half, the first two pieces (by Shaw and Negrón) were more complex; the next two (Run Away and the first Gunn selection) were more straightforward. The former features a slow, plangent melody above long, expertly-tuned chords. The latter features frequently monotone chanting above drum ostinati.

The Negrón was particularly challenging but still rewarding. It was sung over the fullest backing track of the concert: undulating electronic chords and watery percussion. The vocalists nicely integrated themselves into these sometimes quite intricate textures. Raquel Acevedo Klein, who conducted the premiere of the piece, was singing with Roomful of Teeth for the first time. One wouldn’t have known it, as she blended in like a veteran.

In the second half, Judd Greenstein’s Montmartre mixed throat singing, yodeling, and bell imitations in ways that melded rather than clashed. The concert’s closing number, an excerpt from Peter S. Shin’s Bits torn from words from Roomful of Teeth’s recent Grammy-winning album Rough Magic showcased the ensemble’s ability to shape long, flowing lyrical melodies.

The least successful piece as a composition (not as a performance, which was at the same high standard) was “Mercury” from Alev Lenz’s 7 Planets, a series of movements written in the planetary frequencies. It is perhaps intended to sound hypnotic, but felt simply repetitious. Roomful of Teeth recently recorded it in THE TANK in Rangely, Colorado, in whose acoustic it might be more impactful.

University of Chicago Presents continues 3 p.m. Sunday with a concert by Asian Sound Revolution. chicagopresents.uchicago.edu.

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