WELCOME TO OUR 49TH BAY AREA SEASON!

🚨 Priority renewal subscriptions for the 2026-27 season are now available 🚨

Renew your subscription by June 30, 2026 to secure the best seats at the lowest price!

Single tickets will become available for purchase on July 1, 2026

Guillaume de Machaut—composer, poet, and master of self-invention—stood at the dawn of modern music, shaping sound into a monument against time. In this new, staged work, Chanticleer and stage director Elkhanah Pulitzer enter Machaut's world of devotion and desire, where the rituals of courtly love become a meditation on the human heart.

Here, Love, Faith, and Hope appear not as distant ideals or abstractions but as living forces. The singers embody the elegance and restraint of medieval courtship—its gestures of honor and longing—while revealing the vulnerability beneath the form: the wish to be seen, known, and loved without disguise. Through song, movement, and light, Machaut’s music becomes a mirror of our own humanity: of longing as discipline, beauty as revelation, and love—in all its forms—as the most exquisite act of faith.

A Chanticleer Christmas is a treasured holiday tradition, bringing the beauty and wonder of the season to audiences near and far. By the glow of candlelight, voices soar in harmony, weaving together centuries of music that illuminate the joy, mystery, and spirit of Christmas. From moments of hushed reverence to rousing celebration, this beloved program offers a musical embrace of the season’s most cherished sentiments.

Giovanni Valentini (c.1582–1649) was an early Baroque composer who held one of the most prestigious posts of his day as Hofkapellmeister for Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was an organist and keyboard virtuoso who is said to have mastered the clavicymbalum universale, an enharmonic keyboard with 19 keys per octave. Rivaling his contemporaries Heinrich Schutz and Claudio Monteverdi, Valentini’s compositions are full of bold harmonic shifts and rhythmic daring: unrelated keys and extreme chromaticism appear from nowhere, while obscure time signatures keep musicians and audiences on their toes. 

In this concert, Chanticleer teams up with the baroque ensemble ACRONYM to present modern-day premieres of some of Valentini’s most thrilling vocal and instrumental works. Repertoire includes six Litaniae Lauretanae, various motets, and some of Valentini’s most daring instrumental sonatas, nearly all of it unheard since the seventeenth century.

Chanticleer explores humanity’s eternal longing for the ideal: visions of a perfect world, perfect love, or perfect future. Through Chanticleer’s signature blend of voices and with repertoire spanning centuries, we reveal a paradise longed for, imagined, and fleetingly glimpsed through song. Included are songs of praise by Renaissance composers Jean Mouton and Juan Gutierrez de Padilla, as well as sacred manifestations of paradise, with Darius Milhaud’s “Psalm 121” and Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm.” Perfect love, both earthly and divine, finds expression in Giovanni Valentini’s “Adoramus Te, Christe” and Jean Sibelius’s epic Finnish love song, “Rakastava.” A collection of contemporary songs rounds out the program, including arrangements of Richard Evans’s “Journey to Recife” and Manuel Sánchez Acosta’s “Paraiso Soñado,” which remind us that sometimes the only thing standing between us and paradise is a plane, a train, or a dream.

CHANTICLEER PROUDLY REHEARSES IN HAYES VALLEY. WHEN ATTENDING CHANTICLEER EVENTS IN HAYES VALLEY, MAKE A NIGHT OF IT BY ENJOYING THE DYNAMIC RESTAURANT SCENE AND NIGHT-LIFE IN OUR HOME NEIGHBORHOOD.