Music for chorus and percussion given vibrant advocacy by Consonance
Friday night’s concert by the vocal group Consonance was about as tightly themed as a program can be. All three works performed at Grace Lutheran Church in River Forest were for choir and percussion ensemble, and all three set poetry about stars.
Though the program spotlighted the composition by Juhi Bansal, the works by Marybeth Kunat and Dan Forrest on the first half were equally worthy of attention.
First was Forrest’s Three Nocturnes. The title presumably refers to the themes in the texts by Sara Teasdale, Emily Dickinson, and Walt Whitman, as the musical content of the piece is not nocturne-like.
The first movement, “Stars” has the most internal contrast: whooshing and polyphony in the first two stanzas, choir accompanied only by timpani and cymbal rolls in the next, then driving rhythms in the tambourine in the fifth, and a return to the opening for the end. Music director and conductor Michael D. Costello did an excellent job getting the choir to give each section its own unique character.
In the next movement, “Lightly stepped a yellow star” which is filled with carol-like chiming of celesta and glockenspiel, Costello brought welcome clarity to the many overlapping lines at the end. And he elicited a hint of menace in the momentous piano chords in the final movement, “…Thou motive of the stars.”
Marybeth Kurnat’s Messengers sets three poems of her own. Even if her program notes had not mentioned the influence of the theme from The X-Files and Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, both would have been evident, the latter in particular from the use of mallet percussion.
The opening movement is the strongest, with lovely dabs of harmonic color on the words “time” and “light.” The styles and tones of the second and third movements—“are they like us” and “the secrecy of daylight”—are too similar and unvaried. In performance, it was easy to miss where one began and the other ended.
Costello exercised great dynamic control over the choir in the second movement, with well-executed crescendi. The only snag was that the choir was sometimes barely audible over the percussion in the first movement. However, here and throughout the entire concert, the percussion was internally well-coordinated.
As advertised, the main event of the evening was Bansal’s We Look to the Stars, a 60-minute cantata setting astronomy-themed medieval texts from Japan, India, Persia, and Al-Andalus to (in the composer’s words) “celebrate not only the night sky, but also with it the things that unite us in the human experience.”
Two movements overstayed their welcome. Perhaps in an attempt to depict the continuous flow of the title feature, the duet “Heaven’s River” repeated the same phrases ad nauseam. And although one passage in the solo harp interlude “Trail of Stars” had a creative juxtaposition of low-range rumbling, mid-range rippling, and high-range harmonics, the rest of the movement was dominated by long stretches of stereotypical arpeggiation.
But everywhere else in the piece, Bansal’s creative scoring was tremendously effective with impressive variation in style and instrumentation from movement to movement. And crucially, most movements used just a few of the many available instruments, keeping the textures spacious and transparent.
The opening movement, “Stars Traveling – Music,” features part of the choir rubbing the rim of wine glasses filled with water, as solo singers studded throughout the audience sing overlapping lines of poetry.
Two further examples of successful contrast at work: “Absence,” the first a cappella movement, had two stanzas of homophony, one stanza of call-and-response over a drone, and then nice repeated fragmentation of the phrase “here and there.” This was followed by “Eclipse,” a song dominated by percussion: two pounding sets of tom-toms, a bass drum, and claps from the choir.
Four movements call for solo parts. The first is the aforementioned “Heaven’s River,” sung by mezzo-soprano Bethany Brewer and tenor Dennis Kalup. The prominent tremolo in both of their timbres suited the watery textures, although Brewer sounded more comfortable with the range of her part than Kalup did with his.
Tenor Mason Montuoro employed two very different timbres across the movement “The Shattered Stars”: the first was almost countertenor-like; the second was tense and raw.
“The Night Wears Black” is a trio, sung by sopranos Dana Plazak and Tracey Furling and mezzo-soprano Aidan Spencer, each ringing handbells. They were successful in weaving each melisma in and around the other singers, with no one dominating too much.
Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Barrett displayed the clearest timbre and best projection of any of the soloists in “Winter Stars,” which she also phrased with careful attention to the text.
The program will be repeated 3 p.m. Sunday. consonancechicago.org
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