Pasatiempo | Spencer Fordin | Link to article
Santa Fe Desert Chorale has been on the same mission every year for decades: To take standout singers from across the country and meld their voices as one.
Joshua Habermann, entering his 15th season at the helm of Desert Chorale, says he is greeted by confusion from the public about what the chamber choir does.
“Because there’s so many local chorus groups, people who don’t know us will say, ‘You guys are a local group or you’re part of a church. Maybe you’re nice people who love to sing,’” he says. “We love these groups, but that’s not what this is. This is a professional, phenomenal sort of tip-of-the-spear group that’s one of the top couple of chamber choirs in the country.”
Habermann, who lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, during the Desert Chorale off-season, says most of the singers will be familiar to Santa Fe concertgoers.
This season, which kicks off in mid-July, will bring a few new faces, Habermann says, but some of the group’s singers have been around for the artistic director’s entire tenure. The hard part for all the singers is that they have to prepare for a wide and varied repertoire in a short amount of time.
“Our hallmark is that we’re not a specialist ensemble. We do everything,” Habermann says. “There are chamber choirs in the country that do all early music. And there are great groups that do just commissions and new pieces.
“We have a mission that I very much inherited from my predecessors to essentially perform the entire gamut of the repertoire.”
The first piece on the new season’s schedule, The Tudors and the Medici (July 16 to August 3) features the music of Renaissance Europe, with 16 singers harmonizing the works written for Queen Elizabeth’s court and by Italian composer Jacopo Peri.
Then, debuting a week later, Desert Chorale changes pace with The American Immigrant Experience (July 23 to August 4). The piece is imagined as a musical journey that evokes successive generations of immigrants to America and their impact on our musical lexicon.
“I’m excited about that program because it includes narration of words from immigrants themselves who have come up,” says Habermann of The American Immigrant Experience. “Particularly those who are fleeing violence in Latin America, and their reasons and thinking and experiences. And then that’s paired with music that speaks to that experience.”
That program also features the season’s original composition — Northland by Kile Smith (see “Composed Composer”) — which takes four poems by Jamaican immigrant Claude McKay (1890-1948) and sets them to music. The poems run the gamut of emotions.
“His poetry talks about his experience in New York of leaving Jamaica, and his experience in New York of the promise of America and the failures to live up to that promise,” Habermann says of McKay’s poetry. “The exclusion that he felt as a Black man in the 1920s in New York. And then it comes back around to the hope and joy that he took in the place that he now calls home.”
The Ecstasies Above (July 27 to August 5) will feature the work of British-American composer Tarik O’Regan and George Frideric Handel. O’Regan’s work — which gives the program its name — uses the words of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Israfel,” which described a heavenly voiced angel. A string orchestra will accompany the Desert Chorale singers for The Ecstasies Above.
“It’s something for everybody, and that’s the idea behind doing it all in the summer season,” Habermann says. “People can come to all of the programs and expect to hear something unique in each one.”
Composed composer
Kile Smith is on a hot streak.
He’s worked on multiple compositions that have been nominated for Grammy Awards in recent years, and he says he was thrilled to be able to work with Desert Chorale for the first time on the premiere of his work Northland.
“One thing I really love about Desert Chorale is they have not only a very agile and flexible sound, but it’s always very warm,” Smith says. “That’s fun, finding that personality and writing to that. I feel it’s part of my job as much as I can to write not only to the abilities of the ensemble — which in this case as you know is just about unlimited because they’re just so excellent — but also writing to their personality. That’s just a big thrill for me to be able to do that.”
The Pennsylvania-based composer says he did a survey of Claude McKay’s poetry years ago, and that it was sitting in his “back pocket” of material he wanted to set to music. That’s when the commission from Desert Chorale came in, and everything fell into place.
“A lot of the themes that he was writing about are universal,” he says of McKay, a Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet who was born in Jamaica in 1890 and immigrated to the U.S. as a young man. “It comes up in folk music, and it comes up in popular music. You are adjusting to your new country. You may have problems with it. You may love it. But you still never forget where you came from, and that homesickness combines with the sometimes competing and conflicting emotions of your new country.”
Smith chuckles when asked about his work finding new ears over the last few years. He says he’s been on a “slow burn” for about 10 to 15 years now, but the last few seasons have seen him juggling deadlines and adding more gigs.
Part of the nature of his job, in fact, means that he’s frequently working on multiple projects at a time. Smith says he’s looking forward to fine-tuning with Desert Chorale in person and is anticipating how the piece will sound.
“I haven’t heard it at all yet,” he says. “I’ve just heard it on the lousy computer sounds that I have. And I hear it in my head. It’s funny because I’m working on different things, and I’ll have something going through my head. I’ll wake up, and there’s music going through my head, and I’ll think, ‘Oh, that’s interesting. What is that?’ And then I’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s from Northland, right?’”
THAT’S THE TICKET
The 41st season of the Desert Chorale lineup includes:
The Tudors and the Medici: July 16 to August 3
The American Immigrant Experience: July 23 to August 4
The Ecstasies Above: July 27 to August 5
Candlelight Carols: December 9-22
Dates above reference a range. Concerts are held at Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi (131 Cathedral Place). For ticket information, call 505-988-2282 or visit desertchorale.org.
