Chanticleer’s spring 2009 tours include China debut
The
Grammy-winning twelve-male vocal ensemble Chanticleer will give eight performances in
five cities during its first tour of China, which begins on May 1 in Suzhou and ends on May 10
in Hong Kong.
Before
heading to Asia, however, Chanticleer – now in its 31st season –
will give concerts in Morrow, GA; Huntsville, AL; St. Paul and Moorhead, MN;
and the Temple of Dendur at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. In addition to various educational residencies, the group will
also lead a Youth Choral Festival in Hibbing, Minnesota on April 21.
Chanticleer’s touring program this season, entitled “Wondrous
Free”, celebrates the 250th anniversary of the first American song
– it is named after the song “My Days Have Been So Wondrous Free”, which was
penned by Francis Hopkinson in 1759.
The program, which will be given at the Met Museum and elsewhere,
presents a rich panorama of American song across the ages. Highlights include works by
William Billings, Juan de Lienas, Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, Stephen Foster,
Samuel Barber, Eric Whitacre, and a newly-commissioned work by David Conte
entitled The Homecoming: In Memoriam Martin Luther
King. Following the premiere of The Homecoming this fall, San Francisco Classical Voice wrote, “Conte’s work, a Chanticleer commission,
sets an impassioned and thought-provoking poem by John Stirling Walker, in
which a soul expresses anger and frustration that the justice King called for
has yet to come to pass. Both poem
and music have so much going for them that the work demands repeated hearings.”
Chanticleer’s most recent program, “Composers/Our Age”, was presented in concerts
throughout the San Francisco Bay Area and was a great success. Joshua Kosman reported for the San
Francisco Chronicle.
“Although a composer at 30 is still
considered young, a 30-year track record qualifies an arts organization as an
institution. So there’s an
alluring piquancy in Chanticleer’s new commissioning project, ‘Composers/Our
Age’. To celebrate its 30th
anniversary, the estimable men’s chorus called on three composers – born around
the same time the group was founded – to contribute pieces on subjects of their
own choosing. The resulting
program, introduced in Berkeley’s First Congregational Church on Tuesday night,
was enlivened not only by a wide stylistic range but by the combination of
youthful energy and technical mastery on display.”
In the Q
& A that follows, Christine Bullin, the President and General Director of Chanticleer,
discusses Chanticleer’s recent and current programs, the upcoming China tour,
and the group’s continuing commitment to educational outreach.
A
conversation with Chanticleer’s President and General Director, Christine
Bullin
Chanticleer
recently finished performing, throughout the Bay Area, a program of
commissioned works called “Composers/Our Age”. The program features music by three 30-something composers –
Mason Bates, Shawn Crouch, and Tarik O’Regan – and it has been introduced in
Chanticleer’s 31st season.
This
program was a breath of fresh air that put the spotlight entirely on these
young composers. The pieces they
wrote are very strong, and working with such young composers is a charming
experience because they have such an open concept of what music is. For someone like Mason Bates, music is
just music. He’s not writing it
for tenure, or to be self-consciously post-modern. His music is not all about labels. Each of the six movements in his new piece for us, Sirens, is very different – using elements
of everything from jazz and blues to electronica. He writes music that is very audience-friendly.
Tell
us about the other works.
Shawn
Crouch’s piece, The Garden of Paradise, is a departure for us, something of a “current
events piece” – like John Adam’s operas.
Sean’s younger brother was recalled for a third tour in Iraq, and that
is what inspired his piece. The
text is based on poems by an Iraq War veteran, and singing about what’s
happening around us is important and exciting for us to do. I think it’s important for the group
and for the audience to hear music that has something to do with what’s
happening now.
Chanticleer’s
Artistic Adviser, Joseph Jennings, thinks Tarik O’Regan’s No Matter, which is settings of texts by
Samuel Beckett, is one of the most beautiful pieces the group has ever
sung. As music, it is more
intellectual than the other two pieces.
Mason’s music is drawn from the world around him, and Sean wrote about a
subject he thought was important.
With Mason, complexity in and of itself isn’t important – his chief
concern is the effect of the music on the audience. Tarik’s piece is more introverted and complex – it’s very
high for the sopranos. All three
works on this program are extremely different in style, intent, and atmosphere,
and together they reflect the vitality of the contemporary music scene.
Is it
a challenge to get such new works programmed more than the few times when they
are premiered?
With the
Crouch and Bates works, the movements are performable as excerpts, and we plan
to sing them on the road, and around the world, next year. Chanticleer will sing Shawn Crouch’s piece
in St. Paul on April 23. Overall,
it’s a very rewarding experience to raise money, take risks, and wait and deal
with deadlines in the hopes of receiving pieces that will have legs. If we think a piece is suitable we can
perform it hundreds of times. In
the first year we can do it 50 times if it fits well. Few other organizations can give so many subsequent
performances. We’re also happy
when other groups, most of them not professional, take up these pieces and sing
them. When you hit the jackpot,
these pieces can really get out there.
Chanticleer’s
main touring program this season, “Wondrous Free”, is a wide-ranging collection
of American songs. The group is
performing it at home in the States – including in the Temple of Dendur at New
York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on April 15 – but also on tour in Asia and
Europe.
“Wondrous
Free”, which takes its name from a 1759 song by Francis Hopkinson that is
considered the first American song, is a very enjoyable program – not at all
pedantic and very entertaining.
It’s an amalgam of all these different influences that go into the American
melting pot. When you propose this
program abroad you get such interesting reactions. The French are just tickled that it’s very exotic, that all
of these influences exist in a single country. We don’t discriminate!
The average American would find it hard to describe what “American”
music is, and this program is a fairly lighthearted answer. The program will be done this spring in
China, where it’s called “Sounds of America”. A presenter in France has a series called “Light and
Shadow”, and I realized that this program works perfectly with such a thematic
concept – that it has plenty of light and shadow. Remember, Stephen Foster was writing in the depths of the
Civil War. As Americans, we don’t
tend to dwell on the shadows – we tend to make light of them. As Foster writes in one of his songs,
“Hard times, come again no more!”
Chanticleer
has toured Asia many times, but beginning May 1 [through May 10] it will give
its first performances in China.
That’s
true. We’ve been to Japan and
Taiwan and Hong Kong and Singapore, but this is our first time in China and it
will be an extremely intense experience singing there. There is already a great deal of
expectation for these concerts. In
Shanghai, for example, the inexpensive seats are sold out and there are banners
on the streets. This is intriguing,
because there’s not a lot of choral music in China – though there’s now a
chorus at the Shanghai Conservatory.
But choirs are developing across the country. And the King’s Singers have been successful there. When we imagined this tour we imagined
three cities, but now it involves five cities and eight performances in ten
days!
There
are also some other special reasons this China trip is significant.
Well, San
Francisco has an extremely important sister-city relationship with
Shanghai. And it’s also the 30th
anniversary of Isaac Stern’s historic visit to the Shanghai Conservatory, which
was chronicled in the film From Mao to Mozart – 1979 was when that happened. The visits of artists and musicians
were a big part of the opening of China, and China understands that cultural
exchange is an accompaniment to diplomatic communication. We’ll be offering two programs there,
including From the Path of Beauty,a work we commissioned from Chen Yi and perform with the Shanghai
Quartet. Weigang Li, the founder
of the Shanghai Quartet, was at the Shanghai Conservatory when Isaac Stern
came. He went on to became one of
the first Chinese musicians to come to San Francisco as the door opened. He learned about string quartets in San
Francisco, and then went back to Shanghai and founded this one. The commercial relationship that exists
between China and the U.S. is huge, and cultural exchanges paved the way. But when the going gets sticky, as it
might again, the real people-to-people exchanges need to go on.
Chanticleer
has had a very ambitious education program over the years and spends a lot of
time in schools working with young singers. Tell us about some of the activities you’ll be doing in the
coming weeks.
In Hibbing,
Minnesota – that out of the way place where Fargo was filmed – we’ll be doing our
Youth Choral festival that we do around the country every year. Minnesota is important to us because of
our long ties to Minnesota Public Radio, but also because it is choral “ground
zero” in the United States. Choral
activity is huge there. We invited
the Hibbing High School to work with us a few years ago. And now they‘ve invited us and we’ve
decided to do it. Some of our education
initiatives are funded by the NEA [National Endowment for the Arts], and our
ongoing goal is to hook up with the people who are the “energy points” in our
field, especially the choral directors with zeal. And that’s how these festivals happen. It’s all about these people and their
willingness to step out. In ways,
our educational program is our best-kept secret: people hear what we do in this
area but they probably don’t realize how much time and attention we devote to
it. And we don’t do this
grudgingly.
Since
choirs are all about the interaction of individual singers, this would seem
like an inescapable mission for a leading ensemble such as Chanticleer.
Choral art
is a populist one, the one classical art form that everyone can participate in
and that so many do. These people
are the hardcore of our fan base and audience. It’s a fan base that is very sophisticated. They read music and they do what we
do. Chanticleer’s singers come out
of choruses and have respect for them.
It’s a democratic art form, and anyone can make music if they can listen
to someone tell them when to breathe and don’t have a tin ear!
You’re
hoping to put your education program into the national spotlight next season
with many special new initiatives.
That’s
true. Education is the DNA of
Chanticleer: this is our world and we want to give back to it. This is the way we encourage our future
audiences. All the Chanticleer
singers have choir directors who were influential in their lives. The members of the group have plenty of
time to perform, so they are happy to take time for this. The effort they put into these choral
days is incredibly generous, both full of enthusiasm and seriousness of
purpose. These events help kids
see things they haven’t seen before and give them a sense of standards to
aspire to. Next year we’re going
to spend a lot of time working with kids, headlining three regional American
Choral Directors Association (ACDA) conferences and Youth Choral Festivals
around the country, and putting on our own National Youth Choral Festival in
San Francisco with twelve invited choirs from the Bay Area and around the
country. We’re going to make a big
deal of it. There are so few
collective activities in America and singing in a chorus is one of them. It teaches you to do things with other
people, something we’re doing less and less. In a chorus you collaborate willingly and submit your own
self to something larger. No one
expects these kids to become professional musicians – though some may – but
they’ll become interested audience members and good citizens. It’s all about willingly doing a
pleasurable thing with other people.
Chanticleer: upcoming
engagements
In
the U.S.
April
15
Educational
Residency, Long Island University
Brookville,
NY
April
15
Metropolitan
Museum of Art
New
York, NY
April
17
Educational
Residency
Morrow,
GA
April
17
Spivey
Hall – Clayton State University
Morrow,
GA
April
18
Spivey
Hall – Clayton State University
Morrow,
GA
April
19
Trinity
United Methodist Church
Huntsville,
AL
April
21
Youth
Choral Festival
Hibbing,
MN
April
22
Educational
Residency – Apollo Senior High School
St.
Cloud, MN
April
23
Ordway
Center
St.
Paul, MN
April
24
Concordia
Memorial Auditorium
Moorhead,
MN
On
tour in China
May
1
Suzhou
Grand Theater
Suzhou,
China
May
2
Shanghai
Concert Hall
Shanghai,
China
May
3
Shanghai
Concert Hall
Shanghai,
China
May
4
Private
Event, Shanghai Conservatory
Shanghai,
China
May
5
National
Grand Theater
Beijing,
China
May
6
National
Grand Theater
Beijing,
China
May
8
Shenzhen
Concert Hall
Shenzhen,
China
May
9
Educational
Residency
Hong
Kong, China
May
10
Sha
Tin Town Hall
Hong
Kong, China
Back
in the U.S.
May
17
Modesto
Junior College Main Auditorium
Modesto,
CA
May
18
Educational
Residency
Modesto,
CA
May
19
Educational
Residency
Santa
Monica, CA
May
19
The
Broad Stage
Santa
Monica, CA
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