Pasatiempo | Mark Tiarks | Link to article
Santa Fe Desert Chorale celebrates its 40th anniversary this year as a rara avis in the choral music world. It’s not so much its longevity, although that is also impressive, as the fact that it is one of very few professional choruses in America that sings such wide-ranging programs. Most of its peers specialize, usually in either baroque music or contemporary repertory, while the chorale casts the widest possible net in terms of timeline and geography. And there’s an underlying purpose behind the programming — choral music as a means of bridging boundaries.
Each of this summer’s three programs has a specific theme around which the repertory is organized. Asked which comes first, the theme or the repertory, artistic director Joshua Habermann says it’s a bit of both, with the music more often the starting point. “When we find some great music, we start thinking about what story we might be able to tell through it,” he says. “How can we weave this into something that has a larger human connection?”
It’s a process that begins about three years before each season. “I’ll have a few pieces to start with that are the frame,” Habermann says, “and then we can start building around them as the story and the theme develop.”
The theme isn’t just a marketing ploy or a theoretical exercise. “I’m really interested in cross-cultural conversations and interfaith dialogues,” says Habermann. “Most people think of choral music as coming just from the Christian tradition, and much of it does, but not exclusively by any means. I want to see what barriers we can break and how we can let this music speak across boundaries.”
The season’s first program, Pilgrimage: Songs of the Mediterranean Basin, opens on Sunday, July 17 and explores the secular and sacred music of cultures surrounding the Mediterranean: Spanish, Jewish, Arabic, and North African. A self-described geography nut, Habermann calls the program’s sound world “incredibly varied,” starting with “Chants of Faith,” his own arrangement of a Christian chant, a Muslim call to prayer, and a Jewish sacred melody. “They all get blended together,” he says, “showing how they can work with each other and fit together.”
Fattah Abbou, a Morocco-born multi-instrumentalist and vocalist, will be the program’s special guest artist. He grew up in the High Atlas Mountains, started playing traditional Tamazight (Berber) music at age 7, and is a widely acclaimed North African music master. Part of his job will be teaching Habermann the music the chorale will be singing with him. “I feel a little bit like Eliza Doolittle,” he says, “learning about music and instruments that are just totally unknown for me. I’m happy to be taught.”
Pilgrimage also includes three 15th-century Spanish songs, a set of Sephardic love songs, and four religious songs from the Levantine region, including one performed in Aramaic (the language of Jesus and his followers) and “Yerushalayim Shel Zahav” (Jerusalem of Gold), which honors the major holy sites of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
Mystics and Mavericks celebrates “female sages and innovators, both ancient and modern” in music written by women and spanning more than a millennium. The oldest comes from Kassia, a Byzantine composer active around 850, and the newest from Jocelyn Hagen, a world premiere commissioned by the chorale titled “Caminante” (Wayfarer).
“I asked whether she would be interested in writing a bilingual piece for us,” Habermann says, “that would represent the music of the Americas, and she replied ‘absolutely.’ She took a Spanish-language poem and an English-language one, which you hear first in sequence, and then simultaneously, with this incredible interweaving.”
Mystics and Mavericks also includes three traditional Scandinavian songs and four by the iconic American composer/singer Meredith Monk. “Her music is somehow experimental and compellingly familiar at the same time,” Habermann says, “because it uses just the human voice, which is common to us all.”
For several decades, Monk has written most of her music at a northern New Mexico getaway, not far from Abiquiú. “[The landscape] is so timeless, you feel like a dinosaur could be walking across the mountains,” she told the BBC. “It has an extraordinary spatial and magical quality. Just to be able to hear the way that nature orchestrates these beautiful entrances and exits and these different layers of sounds.”
The elemental beauties and dangers of the world’s oceans are plumbed in the chorale’s final program, The Sounding Sea. Contemporary compositional voices are highlighted, with music from Jake Runestad (b. 1986), Matthew Lyon Hazzard (b. 1989), Moira Smiley (b. 1976), and Mason Bates (b. 1977), whose The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs was the Santa Fe Opera’s most successful world premiere in at least two decades when it bowed here in 2017.
Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi heard about the world’s deadliest shipwreck since the Titanic on a Latin-language news broadcast. The dead numbered 852 in the 1994 sinking of the M.S. Estonia in the Baltic Sea, an event memorialized in his “Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae” (“Song of a Maritime Disaster”).
Mäntyjärvi’s text comes from the news report, the Catholic Requiem Mass, and Psalm 107 (“They that go down to the sea in ships …”), and the vocal techniques he calls for include whispering voices to suggest sea spray, a soprano soloist singing a melody redolent of “Nearer, My God, to Thee,” which at least in legend was being played by the Titanic’s orchestra as it sank, and unpitched speaking in the Morse code rhythm S-O-S. Arrangements of American folk songs, spirituals, and Sacred Harp tunes (a type of shape-note singing) conclude the program.
There’s also an opportunity to hear three chorale members — mezzo-soprano Sarah Brauer and baritones Simon Barrad and John Buffett — perform as soloists on an Aug. 5 concert at St. Bede’s Episcopal Church. The featured composers include some of the expected names, such as Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, and Richard Strauss, along with the less familiar, including Danylo Kryzhavinsky. He’s a 19th-century Ukrainian whose music, along with that of several other composers from Ukraine, will be sung by Barrad. ◀
details
▼ Pilgrimage: Songs of the Mediterranean Basin
▼ Santa Fe Desert Chorale
▼ 4 p.m. Sunday, July 17
▼ Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, 131 Cathedral Pl.
▼ Tickets are $10 to $100; 505-982-5619, desertchorale.org
▼ Face masks required
▼ Opening next: Mystics and Mavericks, 4 p.m. July 24
