VOCAL TREASURES OF THE 'DIVINE ORLANDO' 
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week ofJune 13-20, 2009
                                                                  Vol. 11, No. 112
          SAN JOSE---Composer Orlando di Lasso rarely gets his due, and it’s therefore heartening that the stellar professional male chorus Chanticleer is devoting its June programs entirely to this genius of Renaissance and musical transition.
            In his sacred music he wrote some of the most exquisite polyphonic choruses, so complex that very few church choirs today tackle them. And in his more streamlined penitential psalms he anticipated both elements of the baroque and the vertical (chordal) type of tonal writing dominant for the past 400 years, akin to his contemporary Giovanni Palestrina, whose role in that transition has been as much overemphasized as di Lasso’s has been neglected.
            Chanticleer showed both sides: The first in the six-voice (!) parody mass “Tous les regretz” (All the Sadness), and the second via his Penitential Psalm “Miserere mei Deus” (Have Mercy on Me, Lord).
            But these are a mere sliver of his prolific output and grand diversity, which also comprised chansons, motets, lieder, Italian madrigals, plus sacred music as chromatic as anything in Gesualdo. To do a well-rounded depiction of di Lasso (ca. 1530-1594) and the various styles of his 2,000+ works might require a week’s worth of repertory.
            But the program was exemplary, informative to the core. The half-hour-long (unaccompanied, of course) mass was performed, preceded by the Gombert six-part secular chanson “Tous les regretz” from which the mass’ slowly rising first theme is borrowed (thus the designation “parody mass”). Di Lasso spent most of his career at the Munich court, but he was from France, writing with Latin texts: adding to the confusion, we almost always use the Italian form of his name. And although the mass title is in French, the mass text is in Latin.
            The San Francisco-based group Chanticleer as always sang this impeccably when heard June 12 at the St. Joseph Basilica, a reverberant facility ideal for such choruses. The 12-member group maintains keen intonation and boasts a trio of male sopranos intoning parts originally written for high boys’ voices (at a time when there were not only countless choir schools around, but also well-trained “veteran” boys who retained their high-pitched voices years longer than those today). The male sopranos tailor their voice textures to imitate the pure, vibrato-free voices of youth. Like cathedral spires of old, the voices aspired toward the heavens.
            The considerably more vertical (chordal) music emerges in the five-part Penitential Psalm of the 1570s. With the shifting from modes to tonality, a bass line too begins to emerge, and with it the mainstream of familiar Western music. Little wonder that these psalms were rediscovered by 19th-century musicologists and lathered with praise, becoming the signature for di Lasso performances thereafter---at the expense of 90+ percent of his creative repertoire.
            Both works however attest eloquently to di Lasso’s acumen.
            The group concluded with a di Lasso laud invoking Psalms 148 and 150.
            Much of the credit to Chanticleer’s prowess year in, year out since 1978 goes to the artistic director---formerly the man  who never appears, Joseph Jennings, and now, since last year, tenor Matthew Oltman, part of the vocal ensemble. And since the genre is such a rarity, the three male sopranos merit mention: Dylan Hostetter, Michael McNeil and Gregory Peebles. 
            During this season, Chanticleer has sung more than 100 concerts in 27 states and various foreign countries, including China.  It’s hard to detect a flaw in any facet of its performance.
            CHANTICLEER, 12-member all-male a cappella chorus, repeats the di Lasso program in Sacramento’s St. Francis Church  June 14. For info: go online. 

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2009
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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