By Kyle MacMillan
Like many other performing arts organizations in the United States, the COVID-19 shutdown in early 2020 forced Chanticleer to suspend its ample live performances and tours and shift all its activities to the internet until the summer of 2021.
“It was tough,” said Music Director Tim Keeler. “For a group that usually performs over 100 concerts a year on the road, to have none of that for almost two years was pretty crazy.”
But with nearly all mandates lifted and the worst of the pandemic seemingly over, the nationally recognized 12-member male chorus from San Francisco is back on the road, and it will appear Thursday in the Ravinia Festival’s Martin Theatre as part of a mini-tour that will see the group swoop over to the East Coast.
Tim Keeler, Music Director of Chanticleer
“Things are still a little more up in the air than they had been previously,” Keeler admitted. “With various waves and surges, we’re always monitoring everything, and we don’t take anything for granted. I’ll say that.”
The group, one of a just handful of professional vocal ensembles in the United States that regularly crisscrosses the country, is probably best known in the Chicago area for its annual Christmas concerts at the Fourth Presbyterian Church under the auspices of Symphony Center Presents. But Chanticleer has also appeared 10 times at Ravinia since 1997, last performing one of its signature time- and genre-bending programs in 2018.
The big change for Chanticleer since that summer visit was the August 2020 appointment of Keeler as the ensemble’s sixth music director. He sang with the group in 2017–18 and served as conductor of the men’s choir at the University of Maryland, where he completed his doctorate in choral conducting from afar this spring. “Nobody had a playbook for COVID, so in some ways it was a level playing field, but it was crazy to start a new job in the middle of it all,” he said.
One of Keeler’s big priorities for the group is revamping its digital presence, and the online angle of initiatives that was forced onto Chanticleer during the pandemic turned out to be something of a silver lining by getting that process started. “We definitely got some experience,” he said, “behind the cameras and in front of microphones that we hadn’t had in a while. So, one of my biggest objectives over the next few years is to build on that experience.”
Chanticleer just finished recording a new album, which is scheduled for release in 2023. To go along with that effort will be a series of videos that the ensemble plans to post on YouTube as a way to boost its online visibility. Titled On a Clear Day, the release is mostly a collection of works commissioned by the group in the last 10–15 years that it had not previously recorded. Included are compositions by such composers as Mason Bates, Stephen Paulus, and Steven Sametz. “The Chanticleer [music] library is extensive,” Keeler said, “and one of the thrills for me as music director is going through the cabinets and finding all these amazing pieces by some really brilliant composers.”
Founded in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, the ensemble has typically combined Renaissance music with contemporary repertoire, including a vast array of arrangements and works it has commissioned. Along the way it has received such honors as the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming. “Finding those nuggets of continuity across the centuries is really exciting, and one of the great ways to do that is to contrast early music with contemporary music,” Keeler said.
For its Ravinia program, Chanticleer is performing two works by early Franco-Flemish composers—In exitu Israel by Josquin des Prez (c.1455–1521) and Virgo dei throno digna by Johannes Tinctoris (c.1435–1511)—while the rest of the evening features modern and contemporary works. Two of those pieces will be featured on the new recording: Zhou Tian’s “Strange how we can walk (in L.A.)” from Trade Winds, which Chanticleer commissioned in 2019, and Blow, blow thou winter wind, a setting of a Shakespearean poem by George Walker, the 1996 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music.
Also featured is “Her beacon hand beckons” from To the Hands by Caroline Shaw, who became the youngest-ever recipient of the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2013. Keeler called her a “very intuitive vocal composer,” in part because she is an ensemble singer herself, as a member of Roomful of Teeth. “She gets the voice,” he said. “A lot of times you get orchestral composers who treat the voice as though it were, I don’t know, a violin, and sometimes that works really well and sometimes it doesn’t.”
Many of the works on this program are first-time performances by Chanticleer, including Trevor Weston’s Oh Daedalus, fly away home and Shaw’s piece, and Jonathan Woody’s God’s gonna trouble, a combined arrangement of two spirituals, is a world premiere.
Virtually all of Chanticleer’s singers are veteran members. The newest addition, countertenor Bradley Sharpe, joined at the beginning of the 2021/22 season, but everybody else has been with the group for at least four or five years. The two longest-tenured members, countertenor Adam Ward and tenor Brian Hinman, are completing their 16th seasons.
“They’ve been doing it for a very long time,” Keeler said, “and actually, another reason this tour is special for us is because it is the last tour for our tenor, Brian Hinman, who has been crucial to the Chanticleer sound for those 16 years. That’s why the [Franz] Biebl Ave Maria is at the end [of the program]. It is a send-off for him, because he has really defined that piece for us.”
While Chanticleer’s schedule is not completely back to the robust number of concerts it performed each year before the pandemic, Keeler is confident that intensity will return. Despite the hundreds of canceled flights and all the other challenges of travel today, the group is committed to touring and bringing its music-making to communities across the country.
“Any performing artist,” he said, “knows how hard it is to go onstage every day or every other day and then have to fly in between that and make everything work and somehow have your own personal life on the side. That’s quite difficult, but it’s also a very unique experience. You’re okay giving up other things for a while.” ●
Kyle MacMillan served as classical music critic for the Denver Post from 2000 through 2011. He currently freelances in Chicago, writing for such publications and websites as the Chicago Sun-Times, Early Music America, Opera News, and Classical Voice of North America.