Chanticleer has been at the leading edge of choral music for 45 years. Every season, the “orchestra of voices” commissions new works by contemporary composers. On a Clear Day contains some never-before-recorded highlights from the past 15 years of Chanticleer’s history. The album includes new works by established composers like Mason Bates, Steven Sametz, and Stephen Paulus, as well as works by rising stars like Zhou Tian, Shawn Crouch, and Ayanna Woods. These commissions are paired with a selection of lesser-heard choral works from other contemporary voices, including Augusta Read Thomas and Pulitzer Prize winners Tania León and George Walker. In typical Chanticleer fashion, the album concludes with three familiar, non-classical songs arranged specifically for the ensemble, including two tracks by the legendary vocal jazz arranger, Gene Puerling.

When played in sequence, the album traces a journey from darkness to light, and from mystery to clarity. To achieve this arc, the album begins with its only non-contemporary selection. BAREKHOSUTYAMB is a prayer from the Armenian Divine Liturgy, here set by the grandfather of Armenian music, Komitas Vardapet. Its ancient text is a call for intercession to the Virgin Mary. The mystical soundworld of ancient Armenia gives way to the murky waters of DIE LORELEI, which comes from Sirens, a 2008 Chanticleer commission composed by Mason Bates. His setting of Heinrich Heine’s poem climaxes with a hypnotic whirl of sound above and around the siren’s “wondrously powerful melody.”

The darkness continues with ALL NIGHT, a movement from The Lotus Lovers, written by Stephen Paulus and commissioned in 2011. His setting of the 4th-century poem by Tzu Yeh captures the extreme sadness and emptiness of a suddenly solitary existence. The text for LULLABY, which is an excerpt from the 2009 commission Paradise by Shawn Crouch, comes from Brian Turner, an Iraq War veteran. In this tender poem, a father looks for ways to comfort his child at night, amidst the terrifying sights and sounds of war. Finally, the darkness and confusion begin to break in Augusta Read Thomas’s THE REWAKING, which sets a poem by William Carlos Williams. “And so by your love,” it concludes, “the very sun itself is revived.”

Two recent commissions, CLOSE[R], NOW, and BIRDS OF PARADISE, form the heart of the album. The first, by Ayanna Woods, was commissioned in 2021. The source material for the work is a Los Angeles Times editorial from March 2020 detailing the reasons why theaters and performing arts venues should “close, now.” Woods restructured and resampled the article to create a new text that highlights the changes we had to make to connect to one another during the pandemic. Through isolation and distance, we were forced to “hone the dexterity of love” and to be creative with how we care for each other. Woods closes the piece with an imperative for the world: “come back to life.”

BIRDS OF PARADISE, by Steven Sametz, was commissioned in 2020. It is a companion piece to Clément Janequin’s Renaissance chanson “Le Chant des Oiseaux,” though with much loftier aspirations. Amidst a menagerie of bird sounds, Sametz explores Christina Rossetti’s poem, “Paradise: In a Symbol.” The singers of Chanticleer become the birds, or the symbols, themselves. Repetitive, wing-like motives flit from tree to tree as the birds call to one another on their ascent to “the Paradise of God.”

BAMBULA is the third movement of De-Orishas by Tania León. This wildly difficult, yet intensely playful dance employs a few simultaneous meters and a few simultaneous keys. The singers mimic drums and maracas. Zhou Tian’s STRANGE HOW WE CAN WALK (IN L.A.) comes from his 2019 commission Trade Winds. In this setting of Seth Michelson’s poem, Zhou Tian captures the quirks of life’s ups and downs with a pop-inflected interlude squeezed between an intense and rhythmically driven beginning and end. That rhythmic intensity continues in George Walker’s BLOW, BLOW, THOU WINTER WIND, in which jagged, chromatic melodies dare the winter wind to do its worst – for nothing can compare to the pain of human unkindness. Walker was the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1996.

The remaining three non-classical selections showcase the other side of Chanticleer. Since its founding, the singers of Chanticleer have reveled in bringing all of their vocal virtuosity and finesse to lighter fare. STORMY WEATHER and ON A CLEAR DAY were arranged for Chanticleer by Gene Puerling – “Stormy weather” in 1988, and “On a Clear Day” in 2000. Vince Peterson arranged BOTH SIDES NOW for Chanticleer in 2013.

Notes by Tim Keeler