Chicago Classical Review

Bruce Tammen led his penultimate program as artistic director of the Chicago Chorale on Saturday night at St. Vincent de Paul Parish Church in Lincoln Park. 

Tammen founded the volunteer choral group in 2001 and has developed it into one of the city’s vocal gems. Saturday’s performance was a prime example of what Tammen has built over 25 years: an ensemble that consistently performs with professional poise in intelligently curated programs of repertoire old and new.

Tammen, who is retiring, will be a hard act to follow. Next season the Chorale will host three guest conductors as finalists for his position, with candidates to be announced in May. Tammen’s final performance with the Chorale will be May 31^st at St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church in Hyde Park, where he will lead the Fauré Requiem.

The main event on Saturday’s hour-long program was Randall Thompson’s The Peaceable Kingdom, a 1935 setting of eight texts from Isaiah. Thompson’s immediate inspiration was a painting of the same name by the Quaker preacher and artist Edward Hicks. Though the artwork depicts animals one might consider natural enemies living in harmony, Thompson’s selected texts create a more fraught image of both pain and redemption.

Tammen led a vivid account of this neglected American masterpiece. In a compact 20 minutes, Thompson creates a layered emotional canvas, writing in a simplified harmonic language that channels music of earlier days.

The conductor and his charges put across this drama every step of the way, particularly attuned to Thompson’s textual painting. “The Noise of a Multitude” sounded like a genuine rabble, and “Howl Ye” came across as glorious wailing. “The Paper Reeds by the Brooks” had a sighing, desiccated feel, and the line “the trees of the field shall clap their hands” in the ensuing movement sounded like boisterous vocal applause.

The work concludes on a note of solace with “Ye Shall Have a Song,” in which the sound blossomed on the words “gladness of heart,” filling the live church acoustic with the Chorale’s gleaming sonority to end the night in spiritual consolation.

The Thompson work was introduced by two sets of brief 20^th-century motets. Tammen led the close harmonies of Javier Centeno’s moving Da pacem, Domine with organic pacing, while Arvo Pärt’s treatment of that same text had more of a sense of stasis. Howells’ dark-hued Long Long Ago depicted the nativity with a folklike sensibility, though with surging moments that capture the rapture of the scene.

Kerensa Briggs’ Media vita oscillates between anguish and respite in its meditation on life and death, contrasts Tammen helped his charges to emphasize, and the forthright expression of Stephen Paulus’ Pilgrims’ Hymn shone in the resonant space.

Palestrina was the program’s sole pre-20^th-century composer, and the polyphony of his Super flumina Babylonis blossomed with fine balance under Tammen’s direction. The Chorale sopranos gamely negotiated the stratospheric solos of René Clausen’s Tonight Eternity Alone, evoking the flickering rays of the setting sun, before Tammen led the work’s tender resolution on “the wonder of its truth,” anticipating the close of the Thompson.

It remains a striking feature of Chicago Chorale performances that none of the singers are professionals. They do this for the sheer joy of making music with one another, a simple devotion that was particularly palpable in Saturday’s performance.

The program will be repeated 3 p.m. Sunday at Hyde Park Union Church. chicagochorale.org

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