Calmus Vocal Quintet. July 27, 2016.

Richardson Auditorium, Princeton.  Balcony Left (free).

Members

Anja Poche, soprano; Sebastian Krause, counter-tenor; Tobias Poche, tenor; Ludwig Bohme, baritone; Manuel Helmeke, bass.

Program: ALL THE WORLD’S A STAGE - Shakespeare a Capella

The was the fourth and last of the Princeton Summer Free Chamber Music series for this season, and is the third one I attended.  The ensemble is all all-voice group, and I believe this was my first encounter with a group like this (not counting the isolated instances.)

The group at the end of the first half.

While I can carry a tune, I don’t think I have as much appreciation of the voice as an instrument as “instrument” instruments.  So my expectations weren’t that high when I sat down.  Anne and I came away very satisfied, happy that we went even though we couldn’t get tickets on line and had to drive to Princeton without knowing if we would be turned away.  Of course that wasn’t really expected as we had never seen a full auditorium.

The selection of music reminded me of yesterday Mostly Mozart concert.  Yesterday the songs were picked because they had to do with emotions.  For today most of the songs were selected because they were written to Shakespeare’s lyrics.  Many of them were arranged for the quintet by one of the musicians in the group.

The Concert Program.

Each of the members also took turn to talk a bit about the music, which added quite a bit of appreciation when the songs were performed.  There were some musicological insights as well, but I frankly didn’t get all of it, and in any case don’t remember much of it.

The one aspect that was interesting to me was while the pieces range from being written in the 17^th century (or even earlier) to the 20^th, the “styles” were not all that different.  Take as an exmaple the group of three songs chosen for their association with “Twelfth Night.”  One was written by Purcell, the other two were written by the Finnish composer Jaakko Mantyjarvi (b. 1963) and Nancy Wertsch (b.1943).  If I hadn’t read the program, I wouldn’t have placed the composers that far apart.  Now that may just point to my lack of music knowledge, but I certainly won’t make the same mistake with instrumental music, or operas for that matter.

One reason I put forward is one can make an inanimate instrument do all sorts of atonal stuff.  As long as you hit the right key or have the finger in the right place, the music will come out.  With a capella singing however, the artists are limited by more natural intervals (I won’t go into the physics, but octaves, fifths, and thirds are more natural than fourths and sevenths, for instance.)  With instruments provided a reference (from an accompanist, for example), most competent musicians can get the note right.  However, if all you have are other people’s voices, then the music has to be written more “naturally.”  And perhaps all this is nonsense.

Each of the individual voices was great, but when put together they just produced incredibly nice music.  Perhaps due to their German background (the group hails from Leipzig), the singers for the most part just stood there, but the coordination among them was simply incredible, they all did their t’s and d’s and the same time, and ended their notes at the same time.

While the songs were sung in English (it’s Shakespeare after all), I had trouble with a lot of the words.  For encore they sang Brahms’s Waldensnacht, in German of course.  An all-Shakespeare program for a first encounter is a bit on the heavy side, so one wish I have is a more varied program so I could appreciate more the musical range a vocal ensemble can provide.

There is something about Princeton during the summer.  At 9:30 pm there were still lots of people out and about.  Of course there was no one on Broadway when we got back to South Amboy.