By Paul Hertelendy 
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of May 15-22, 2011
                                                                  Vol. 13, No. 98
            BERKELEY---You have to admire the courage of the local chamber chorus Volti, always biting off repertory somewhat beyond its capability. 
            I’m an admirer of the group, don’t get me wrong; Volti commissions more new music per season than other musical groups do in a decade or century. And its concert locations, like that Berkeley City Club landmark on May 27, are colossal.
            But perhaps it’s time to relax Volti’s insistence on singing absolutely everything unaccompanied. Too often the industrious singers wander off-pitch, thereby hobbling the impact of new pieces that warrant better treatment. To do a cappella well usually demands a professional set of well-auditioned singers.
            What Volti does have going for it is excellent poetic choices for the texts, as well as a cordial informality in the annotations by veteran Director Robert Geary. The latest set of poems featured 13th-century lauds by Hildegard von Bingen,  17^th-century critiques of almost everything vocal by Tesauro, and very 20^th-century poems by that most approachable of poets laureate, Billy Collins. In three languages, no less, all in treatments by modern composers.
            Volti has an unaccompanied  mixed chorus of 20, placed antiphonally, with most of the music written for that alignment.
            Four out of five pieces sung were written after 2007, and two of them were world premieres. Matthew Barnson’s 25-minute “Genesis” cleverly split the singers, with a focal group rendering the texts while a fringe group of high voices provided an emotional roller-coaster, whether wailing, lamenting, showing trepidation, or simply radiating electricity of frightening amperage. There was dramatic declamation, a variety of shouts and cries, and even some jumbled tone clusters. This is explosive music of high theater, where for “horses running” you almost hear the hoofbeats. Barnson, 31, took bows at the end.
            The other premiere was the 12-minute “voices (and nothing more)” by the Australian Elliott Gyger, to Tesauro’s nihilistic anti-vocal texts, done with sharp interjections and heavy punctuation. It made an impact even though the Italian words were rarely enunciated (for starters, folks, roll some r’s!). The dense polyphonic overlays hampered intelligibility, to be sure.
            Fragmentation was the chosen route of Ruby Fulton in her  “The Ballad of James Parry,” a difficult rhythmic enterprise where texts are broken up pointillistically. There was also a lesson in bodily detachment for Yu-Hai Chang’s “The Night House,” where the Billy Collins poem provides a fascinating out-of-body experience on multiple levels.
            In the only oldie, Frank Ferko harmonized Latin poetry of Hildegard von Bingen. Volti placed the singers all around the audience, producing attractive resonances as if in an old Florentine stone church---perfect for 13^th-century sacred settings.
            But in the end, a music-lover would counsel adding discreet accompaniment here and there to avoid pitch problems, rather than retaining a doctrinaire high-Volti-age insistence on a cappella singing.
            Volti, a mixed chorus of 20 under Robert Geary, concluding this program May 15 in San Francisco. For info: go online.