Volti: the color of there seen from here
Innova

Making good on its avowed commitment to the creation and dissemination of contemporary vocal music, Volti presents on its latest collection premiere recordings of works by five American composers, four of the pieces from the twenty Volti's commissioned since 2013. The San Francisco-based vocal outfit, which ranges from sixteen to twenty-four singers and was founded by Artistic Director Robert Geary in 1979, celebrates its fortieth season with the release. Over that span, more than 100 new works have been commissioned by the ensemble, which holds the distinction of being the only group to have been awarded the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music seven times. The almost hour-long the color of there seen from here, which includes works by Robin Estrada, Tonia Ko, Žibuokle Martinaitye, Forrest Pierce, and Mark Winges, features singers drawn from a pool of fourteen sopranos, six altos, twelve tenors, and eight basses, with Geary conducting.

Left empty and hollow during a period of grief and finding himself unable to compose, Forrest Pierce received a boost of energy from Gary Snyder's poem, “Prayer for the Great Family,” with its expressions of gratitude to the earth, nature, the elements, and our fellow creatures. A better argument for Volti's incandescent sound would be harder to imagine than Pierce's Gratitude Sutra, the luminous thirteen-minute setting that developed from that inspiration. Among other things, the choral work showcases the magnificent polyphony of the ensemble's singing and a dynamic control that sees the group shift from hushed whispers to glorious declamations with an ease that comes from years of dedicated practice.

Using texts from Virginia Woolf's short story “Monday or Tuesday” (1921), Tonia Ko fashioned From Ivory Depths into a two-part evocation rich in texture and nuance. Opening softly, “Monday” advances in carefully calibrated slow-motion, the voices floating and rising and falling from various heights, the threat of collapse omnipresent in the disentangling of the vocal parts. Ko's treatment aligns with Woolf's in the hint of fragmentation that shadows the material's structure and in the shifting patterns that allude to the writer's stream-of-consciousness style. “Tuesday” perpetuates the first movement's approach, though in this case the sense of fragmentation seems even more emphatically explored.

In his provocative Cæli enarrant, Robin Estrada responds to the preponderance of terrorist attacks, gun violence, and hate crimes in the current conflict-riddled United States with passages emphasizing 'The Golden Rule' (“In everything do to others as you would have them do to you”) as articulated in the gospel of St. Matthew. Initiated by forceful call-and-response, the material grows even more daring when the intro segues into a second section of organized chaos, Estrada's use of interlocking melodies designed to mirror the way communities succeed or fail depending on whether individuals find ways to live with one another, before resolving in a concluding section of peaceful meditation where two soloists sing over the choir's open intervals.

Mark Winges, Volti's resident composer since 1990, set All Night to the poetry of Gustaf Sobin (1935–2005) but in an unusual way. Instead of trying to fashion material literally aligned to the texts' word meanings, he tried to write music that reflects “what the poems are and what the poems do, rather than what they say.” To realize that, Winges wrote material that would capture the poems' moods and how their stanzas asymmetrically appear on the page. This is the rare case where an appreciation of the musical work veritably demands it be heard in conjunction with the text display, as doing so reveals the care with which Winges has shaped the composition's sub-units. In the first section, for example, in between the opening four stanzas in “Fugues: All Night the Neolithic” unrelated music of a freer kind appears to establish connecting bridges, and in the central “Provençal Night” sequence, the vocal presentation is noticeably more fragmented, the delivery here mirroring the short line lengths, use of enjambment, and hyphenating of words across lines in the visual display. The measured unfurl of the voices, which emerge in contrasts of male and female groupings and collective and solo forms, often suggests how the poem might sound were it stripped of its melodic dimension and recited by a single speaker.

July 2019