Chicago Classical Review

Andrew Lewis opened his 20^th season as artistic director of the Bella Voce Chorus Saturday night at St. Chrysostom’s Church in the Gold Coast. 

Lewis has developed Bella Voce into one of Chicago’s preeminent chamber choirs, and Saturday’s performance, “How to Fold the Wind,” explored some of Lewis’ favorite 20^th-century repertoire from the past two decades. The consistently high results are a testament to the consummate artistry he has cultivated over his tenure.

Lewis opened the program with the Three Shakespeare Songs of Ralph Vaughan Williams, which set two excerpts from The Tempest (“Full Fathom Five” and “The Cloud-Capp’d Towers”) and one from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“Over Hill, Over Dale”). Vaughan Williams uses close dissonances that evoke the otherworldly settings of these plays, and Lewis evocatively emphasized these pungencies.

Caroline’s Shaw’s How to fold the wind followed, and proved an evening highlight. The work is written in Shaw’s distinctive idiom, familiar to many from her Pulitzer Prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices—extended vocal techniques of slides, grunts, and rasps, but with a backdrop of pure Appalachian harmony. Bella Voce gave the North American premiere of How to fold the wind immediately after the pandemic in October 2021, and Saturday’s committed performance evinced their deep familiarity with the work.

Inspired by Japanese origami and set to Shaw’s own lyrics, the five-movement suite plays with what it might mean for something as ineffable as air to be physically manipulated. The wordless fourth movement, “In Waves,” a glowing hymn-like vocalise, was particularly striking in its abstract yet deeply expressive qualities.

The first half closed with Julia Wolfe’s Guard my tongue, a severe setting of text from Psalm 34 (“Guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking deceit”). Wolfe is also a Pulitzer-winning composer, perhaps best known for co-founding New York’s Bang on a Can collective. Here an atmospheric invocation gives way to dark-hued minimalism from which jazzy counterpoint emerges, a progression that felt somewhat unnatural in Saturday’s performance.

The second half featured two works by Bella Voce members. Bass Edward Frazier Davis wrote I will ride on a poem of Alejandra Villarreal Martinez, which was inspired by the 2022 discovery of a child’s grave from the Stone Age. Outer sections in a propulsive 7/8—depicting the child’s spirit soaring on the winds—frame a sepulchral central episode in a rather direct translation of Martinez’s poem.

Matthew Recio, Bella Voce’s managing director, composed Bone Cathedral during the pandemic, and Saturday was its delayed world premiere. Recio’s work sets a text by Jenna Lanzaro about the patience required for bodily healing, particularly after experiences of injury or trauma. A sense of onerous weight suffuses the work, capturing the plodding experience of waiting for the body to mend itself. Lewis and his charges gave superb advocacy to their colleagues’ compositions.

Lewis led the austere prayer of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Hear us in Heaven with forthright expression, conjuring the Icelandic composer’s distinctive meditative stasis in the work’s few short minutes. John Tavener’s Two Hymns to the Mother of God divides the choir in two, employing a simple harmonic language but in unexpectedjuxtapositions to create a suprising polyphony, which the singers deftly negotiated.

The evening closed with the Estonian composer Veljo Tormis’ Curse Upon Iron (Raue needmine). A searing, rageful indictment of the materials used for weapons and violence, this forceful work proved unlike any choral music one is likely to have heard, as Lewis promised in his introduction.

Guttural throat singing produces an effect like a didgeridoo, over which the rapid-fire Estonian lyrics are violently spat. The impression of a horrifying mob develops as the work builds, and a genuine scream from the ensemble toward the end projects a palpable terror. Lewis drove the performance conducting from an insistently battered hand drum, and soloists Matthew Dean and Frazer contributed gamely to the frightful sonic experience.

Bella Voce repeats “How to Fold the Wind” 2:30 p.m. Sunday at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Evanston. bellavoce.org

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