Exciting singing — maybe too consistently so — from the Santa Fe Desert Chorale - The Dallas Morning News

From excellent high school and college choirs to various professional choral ensembles, North Texas is a hotbed of choral activity. In addition to homegrown talent, several Dallas churches present major touring choirs, from professional chamber groups to European cathedral and collegiate choirs.

On Sunday evening, Highland Park United Methodist Church’s Tower Arts Series presented the Santa Fe Desert Chorale, a top-notch, 24-voice group with Dallas connections. Its director, Joshua Habermann, is also director of the Dallas Symphony Chorus, and three of Sunday’s singers have North Texas roots.

Comprising the crème de la crème of professional choral singers from coast to coast, the group presents an annual concert series in Santa Fe and environs, but it has also ventured to Dallas. Sunday’s program, titled “Strength and Refuge: A Joyous Exploration of the Psalms,” featured Psalm texts in musical settings from the 17th to 21st centuries, by composers of multiple nationalities. Habermann’s friendly, to-the-point spoken introductions were exactly what such things should be but rarely are.

The program opened with a spirited Psalm 116 setting, “Crediti,” by the 17th-century Mexican composer Juan de Lienas. Evidence of the sophisticated church music culture imported by Spanish conquerors, these answering and overlapping double-choir textures could have passed for the Italian master Giovanni Gabrieli, born half a century earlier.

Three selections by turn-of-the-17th-century composers offered stylistic contrasts. Johann Schein’s “Die mit Tränen säen” alternated flowing writing, evoking the text’s tears, with dancing celebration. Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s “Chantez à Dieu nouveau cantique” was all jolly, springing counterpoint. The Italian Jewish composer Salamone Rossi set Psalm 112 in Hebrew, in mainly chordal antiphony. Bach was represented by the celebratory final chorus of his motet “Singet dem Herrn.”

Habermann segued directly from a spacious, hypnotic section of Rachmaninoff’s All Night Vigil to Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford’s elegantly flowing “Beati quorum via” — “Blessed are the undefiled" — from Psalm 119.

The “Nisi Dominus” section of Monteverdi’s 1610 Vespers, contrasting slow-moving sections with more dancing counterpoint, was directly succeeded by Santa Fe Vespers 2010 by Oregon composer Robert Kyr. Composed for the 400th anniversary of Santa Fe, and of Monteverdi’s famous work, this triptych echoed earlier textures in mellifluously modern harmonies.

In “Audi coelum verba mea” upper voices danced around a chant melody slowly declaimed by men. In “Ave maris stella,” washes of sound yielded to a duet for two women evoking two seraphim calling to one another. Throughout, the 13-minute work impressed with deft part writing and handling of sonorities.

Shawn Kirchner’s “Make me to know,” about the transience of life, afforded an oasis of introspection, with an apt climax at “How they rage and strive.” “Jubilate Deo” by the Lithuanian Vytautas Miskinis closed the program with dancing syncopations, spelled by sobriety at words about fearing God.

The singing throughout was boldly projected, finely finished and expressed and, where necessary, quite nimble. In several of the baroque pieces I did wonder if Habermann’s brisk tempos would have worked — or been thought desirable — in reverberant 17th- and 18th-century churches. And early on, one of the tenors stuck out a little.

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Exciting singing — maybe too consistently so — from the Santa Fe Desert Chorale - The Dallas Morning News
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