Revisiting Chanticleer's Labyrinths
A performance by Chanticleer is always something special – twelve male voices dicing in harmony, playing magic games with our ears and our memories – a musical experience like no other! But a Chanticleer concert is never just a musical occasion. Their programs are carefully crafted, always full of meaning and mystery. The first time they came to sing for Music in the Somerset Hills, it was December of 2016, in those halcyon pre-pandemic days, and they sang a joyous holiday program.
At their most recent appearance with us on July 22, 2023, they were back in the same location – the spacious acoustic wonderland of St. Mary’s Abbey at Delbarton – but it was midsummer this time, and they had come to spin us a delicate, twisting program they called Labyrinths. “Exploring a labyrinth can be scary,” explained Tim Keeler, Chanticleer’s music director, “but it can also be meditative, and sometimes even healing.”
The evening began where Chanticleer almost always begins - deep in the Renaissance - with the music of Johannes Tinctoris and Josquin des Prez. Almost immediately, we were whipped forward five centuries to the music of our contemporary world, much of it commissioned by Chanticleer themselves. There was Stephen Paulus’s All night and Judee Sill’s Lopin along through the cosmos, and Trevor Weston’s wonderful setting of the Robert Hayden poem about slavery, Oh Daedalus, fly away home, with its stomping juba dance and memories of Africa in the Georgia night (and there was Dr. Weston himself, chair of the Music Department at Drew University, sitting second row right!). Another old friend of Music in the Somerset Hills, the brilliant bass-baritone, Jonathan Woody, had arranged the spiritual God’s gonna trouble, which took us to intermission, deeply immersed in the labyrinth.
The second half brought us slowly home through the storms and challenges that life continues to throw at us – Harold Arlen’s Stormy Weather, Joni Mitchell’s familiar Both sides now (“Rows and flows of angel hair/and ice cream castles in the air”) and Caroline Shaw’s Her beacon-hand beckons were just some of the landmarks along the way, all of them rendered by those twelve beautiful voices as a spellbinding exercise in polyphony – certainly that, but much more than that, because with Chanticleer you hear every word, every accent, every sigh.
In truth, the journey through the labyrinth is, indeed, rather scary, because the words are the words of poets, and they don’t pull their punches. But it’s the harmonies that remain in our ears and our memories long afterwards, and you could tell from the huge standing ovation that this audience would be back in these seats at St. Mary’s just as soon as we can have them back with us here at Music in the Somerset Hills!
Written by Richard Somerset-Ward, edited by Erin Schwab