Mission Magic

Three distinct ingredients propelled last Friday evening's presentation in the Mission San Luis Obispo de Tolosa of Chanticleer's Mission Road to the apogee of our musical experience: venue, historical research, and performance perfection.

The halls, bars, and cathedrals of history have always helped shape the music styles and performance forces of their times. When Junipero Serra set about establishing a string of missions up through Alta California the building designs in modest part reflected that of the churches and cathedrals he knew from back home in Mexico, designed for the music of that time, best represented by Antonio de Salazar and his student Manuel de Sumaya.

But much of the music that might have been performed in the missions, the plainsongs that reverberated off the solid adobe-brick walls, the arias that floated up to the high raftered ceilings had been lost and forgotten, that is until Cal Poly professor Craig Russell began to unearth them. His passion for the Mexican Cathedral music and for the California Missions also infected his graduate students, who assisted in the recovery and reconstruction of compositions that had lain forgotten in archives for hundreds of years.

Then came the magic of collaboration, a musical marriage between Russell and Chanticleer, arguably the best male chorus in the world today, which produced four CDs and ultimately stimulated this musical tour of the missions, this Mission Road.

We were smitten from the first sounds. The perfection of the unison response  in the plainsong Venite Adoremus Regum regum by eleven male singers in the center aisle somewhere behind us - and how could that many singers manage to sound like a single beautiful voice? - set the tone for the delights to come. Chanticleer on this tour consisted of a bass, a bass-baritone, a baritone, three tenors, three male altos, and three male sopranos. Each is a highly trained voice, capable of solo oratorio or opera (as indeed most have done), and skilled in the music arts. Necessarily so, for Salazar and Sumaya present intricacy in their vocal compositions the equal of any madrigal or polyphonic choral work demanding individual part independence, great tonal accuracy, and incredible vocal flexibility. Each and every Chanticleerean demonstrated this ability and more. Add to that a uniform perfection of enunciation, rendering even the archaic Spanish in absolute clarity, syllable by syllable. The presentation encompassed great variety, from recitativo and arias such as Ya la naturaleza redimida by Manuel de Sumaya performed beautifully by male alto Cortez Mitchell (close your eyes and you saw a female operatic contralto!) to Estribillo and Coplas (refrain and verses), and then Sumaya's seguidillas, a new genre (to his time) of song and dance.

The height of musical enjoyment for the evening came with Salazar's Salve Regina for eight voices, a beautifully intricate work with a chant melody leading to the motet, gradually building momentum with back and forth sallies from choir to choir, alternating complex independent interweaving vocal lines with the contrasting power of the full unified chorus to incredible effect.

Our enraptured enjoyment of the performance was enhanced by the realization that the music sounding here in this mission had not been heard anywhere for hundreds of years, returning now for our ears only in the venue for which it was originally intended. Chanticleer was accompanied by violin, cello, arch lute, and guitar played by consummate professionals, including Professor Russell himself.

After the last note of the evening had trailed off somewhere high above us the audience leapt to their feet with loud exclamations of "Bravo", sounds that may not have been so authentic to the venue, but which felt entirely appropriate and right nonetheless.

(Mission Road is a series of concerts by Chanticleer performed in six missions from San Francisco to Santa Barbara presenting the music of Salazar and Sumaya)