The Santa Fe Desert Chorale is widely known for its popular Summer Festival (it celebrated its 24th season in 2006) and companion Winter Festival each December. The choir is a group of 20 professional singers from various parts of the U.S. and its programs cover the whole range of choral repertoire, from Machaut and Palestrina to Whitacre and Pärt, from Renaissance motets to modern spirituals. This program is a document of the Chorale’s Christmas concert from 2005, recorded live from Santa Fe’s Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis. On paper at least, you can’t complain about the diversity in a list that includes Kirke Mechem’s imaginative, festive carol cycle, Seven Joys of Christmas, Iris Levine’s infectious Hiney Mah Tov, several Rutter pieces, Britten’s “This Little Babe” (from A Ceremony of Carols), Jackson Berkey’s arrangement of Joy to the World, and a selection from Conrad Susa’s own Southwest-themed carol cycle, Carols and Lullabies. And yet, it’s just that diversity that undoes the continuity or cohesiveness of the program. The musical choices and their sequences seem random–more a hodge-podge than a unified concert presentation, although one obviously designed to feature a harp as both soloist and accompanist on many of the selections.
As we might expect, the singing is quite good, especially impressive in the creative atmospherics of Daron Hagen’s Lullay and in Steven Heitzeg’s setting of e.e. cummings’ poem “little tree”, an inspired and masterfully conceived piece of work by any standard and unquestionably the disc’s highlight. The Britten just doesn’t have the wondrous lightness and brightness of being when an adult mixed choir sings it; Berkey’s Joy to the World is typically over-the-top; Rutter’s O Holy Night arrangement is predictably rather than cleverly schmaltzy; Hiney Mah Tov is a delightful dance; Susa’s “Alegría” has moments of off-sounding intonation between the two baritones; the classic What Sweeter Music gets prettily dressed in new colors with a harp accompaniment; and the final work by William Hawley has high hopes but ultimately fails to make a convincing case for its thematic pretense.
This is a mixed program–in more ways than one!–by one of North America’s finest choirs, but it’s high points are well worth hearing, especially Heitzeg’s “little tree”. Applause briefly intrudes here and there after some numbers–perhaps these places weren’t editable, but the more extended applause at concert’s end could have, should have, been scrubbed.
