Chanticleer my secret heart

Ce ris plus doux – Anthoine de Bertrand (c. 1540 - 1581)
The work of Anthoine (sometimes, Antoine) de Bertrand is much less known than that of Philippe (sometimes, Filippo) de Monte. He is believed to have been born in Fontanges, in the Auvergne region of France, in 1540, although some records indicate an earlier birthdate of 1530. Like de Monte and others, he was influenced by the Italian madrigals of his time. There is a unity and compactness to his work, which makes its greatest effect with short-lined melismatic passages, off-the-beat syncopations and delicate word-painting.
Bertrand was quite taken with the poetry of Ronsard. He seems to have positioned himself as a member of the “inner circle” of the city of Toulouse, where he surrounded himself with other poets and composers, political figures and painters who reveled in the poetic genius of their Parisian colleague. Bertrand’s first book of chansons based on poetry of Ronsard, “Premier Livre des Amours de P. de Ronsard, 1578,” was dedicated to the Bourbon Charles III. Although Bertrand himself suggested, in the dedication, that this would be the first of several such collections, only two seemed to have been published.
Ce ris plus doux is a sweet piece, as its title might imply. The poet/lover delineates the beauty of his sweetheart. “The smile is sweeter than a bee’s honey, the teeth are a double-row of diamonds, the lips are crimson, the voice would waken even the dead.” The voices of Ronsard and de Bertrand are seductive, not death-defying. Only once does the music escape the bounds of decorum, as the poet suggests that the enchantment of “her sweet voice” makes even the woods jump for joy.
Ce ris plus doux que l’œuvre d’une abeille, This smile, sweeter than a bee’s honey

Ces doubles lis doublement argentés, These teeth like two silvery ramparts,

Ces diamants à double rang plantés These diamonds planted in double rows

Dans le corail de sa bouche vermeille, In the coral of her crimson lips,

Ce doux parler qui les mourants éveille, This sweet speech which re-awakens souls,

Ce chant qui tient mes soucis enchantés This song which holds my fears enchanted

Et ces deux cieux sur deux astres entés, And these two heavens above two stars,

De ma déesse annoncent la merveille. Announce the miracle which is my Goddess.

Du beau jardin de son printemps riant From the beautiful garden of her youthful springtime

Naît un parfum qui même l’Orient Is born a perfume, which heaven at all times

Embaumeraît de ses douces haleines. Would perfume with its sweet breath.

Et de là sort le charme d’une voix And from thence issues the magic of a voice

Qui tout ravis fait sauteler les bois Which makes the woods, completely charmed, jump for joy

Planer les monts et montagner les plaines. Flattens mountains and raises up the plains.

“Hommage à Edith” – Jaakko Mäntyjärvi (b. 1963)
Jaakko Mäntyjärvi is a Finnish translator and composer. A professional freelance translator, he is also an active semi-professional musician involved mostly in choral singing. Consequently, most of his output as a choral composer consists of choral works, some 100 of which have been published to date. He describes himself as an eclectic traditionalist. From 2000 to 2005 he was composer-in-residence of the Tapiola Chamber Choir, and he has also taught a course in the history of choral music at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. Over the years, the music of Mäntyjärvi has had an honored place in Chanticleer’s repertoire. Die Stimme des Kindes, the eerie Canticum Calamitatis Maritimae, and Mäntyjaärvi’s setting of Longfellow’s poem, The Tide Rises, the Tide Falls, quickly became audience favorites. We are proud to be premiering Hommage à Edith this season with the support of the Osher Pro Suecia Foundation.
Mäntyärvi’s harmonic palette is immediately recognizable: it encompasses both extended harmonies (7ths, 9ths, sharp 11ths) and diminished chords. A deep appreciation for text painting is present throughout, evidenced by his creation of an organic ebb and flow between written and musical spheres. The work is cast in three movements, each movement a setting of a poem by the profound and enigmatic Edith Södergran. Mäntyjärvi’s music allows the listener a share in her powerful perspectives on love. Södergran lost her father to tuberculosis when she was a teenager, and contracted the disease herself a year later. She lived the rest of her life fighting the debilitating illness, weathering waves of self-doubt and depression until her death in 1923, when she was thirty-one years of age.
Mäntyjärvi writes,
Södergran’s poetry was groundbreaking for her time, being unrhymed and in free verse and focusing on experiences of the individual, often with Futurist and Symbolist flavors. Much of her writing is dominated by a melancholy mood, probably because of her awareness of her terminal condition. Although initially her work was regarded as scandalously unconventional and difficult to understand, she was championed in public by several established authors. However, her true merit has only really been recognized in recent decades. Her poems are frequently quoted and have been set to music by numerous composers.
Den skönaste guden The most beautiful god
Mitt hjärta är det skönaste i världen. My heart is the most beautiful in the world.

Det är heligt. It is holy.

Vem som än ser det Whoever sees it

må återstråla av dess glans. may shine reflecting its splendor.

Mitt hjärta är lätt som en fågel, My heart is as light as a bird,

sprödare format ting fanns ej på jorden. there is no more delicately formed thing on earth.

Jag offrar det I offer it up

åt en okänd gud. to an unknown god.

Guden högst uppe i molnen - The god high up in the clouds –

mina vingar bära mig dit - my wings bear me up there –

den skönaste guden the most beautiful god

inför vilken allt är stoft. before whom all is dust.

Jag skall återvända I shall return

med ett skimmer kring min panna - with a shimmer around my forehead –

ingen skall se något annat and none shall see anything

än natt och gud. but night and god.

Gudarnas lyra Lyre of the gods
Var finnes väl lyran Where is that lyre

av silver och elfenben, of silver and ivory

den gudar förlänat that the gods have entrusted

de dödligas stam? to this mortal race?

Den är ej förlorad, It is not lost,

ty eviga gåvor for eternal gifts

av tiden ej nötas, shall not be worn by time,

i eld ej förgås. nor destroyed in fire.

Men kommer en sångare, But when a singer comes

som märkts utav ödet, marked by destiny,

han hämtar den åter he shall recover it

ur bortglömda valv. from long-forgotten vaults.

Och när han den strängar, And when he strums it,

då vet hela världen the whole world shall know

att gudarna leva that the gods live

på oanad höjd. on ineffable heights.

Till Eros To Eros
Eros, du grymmaste av alla gudar, Eros, thou cruelest of all gods,

varför förde du mig till det mörka landet? why did you lead me to this dark land?

[När flickebarnen växa till [When little girls grow up,

bliva de utestängda från ljuset they are shut out of the light

och kastade i ett mörkt rum.] and cast into a dark room.]

Svävade icke min själ som en lycklig stjärna Did not my soul sparkle like a happy star

innan den blev dragen i din röda ring? before it was drawn into thy red circle?

Se, jag är bunden till händer och fötter, Behold, I am bound hand and foot;

känn, jag är tvungen till alla mina tankar. know, I am slave to my thoughts.

Eros, du grymmaste av alla gudar: Eros, thou cruelest of all gods:

jag flyr icke, jag väntar icke, I do not fly, I do not wait,

jag lider endast som ett djur. I merely suffer like an animal.

Go, lovely rose – Eric Whitacre (b. 1970)
An accomplished composer, conductor and lecturer, Eric Whitacre has received composition awards from ASCAP, the Barlow International Composition Competition, the American Choral Directors Association, and the American Composers Forum. In 2001, he became the youngest recipient ever awarded the coveted Raymond C. Brock commission by the American Choral Directors Association; commercially, he has worked with such luminaries as Barbra Streisand and Marvin Hamlisch. In the last ten years, he has conducted concerts of his choral and symphonic music in Japan, Australia, China, Singapore and much of Europe. He has collaborated with dozens of American universities at which he regularly conducts seminars and lectures with young musicians. He received his M.M. in composition from the Juilliard School of Music, where he studied composition with Pulitzer Prize-winner John Corigliano.
Go, lovely rose was composed when Whitacre was twenty-one years old and a student at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. This piece exhibits pandiatonicism, a harmonic device which utilizes notes within a diatonic scale (without chromatic notes) to create dissonant chords that would become the trademark of Whitacre’s later compositions. The text is a poem by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Waller.
Go, lovely rose
Tell her that wastes her time and me,
That now she knows,
When I resemble her to thee,
How sweet and fair she seems to be.

Tell her that’s young,

And shuns to have her graces spied,
That hadst thou sprung
In deserts where no men abide,
Thou must have uncommended died.

Small is the worth

Of beauty from the light retired;
Bid her come forth,
Suffer herself to be desired,
And not blush so to be admired.

Then die! That she

The common fate of all things rare
May read in thee;
How small a part of time they share,
That are so wondrous sweet and fair!

Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway! – Stephen Foster (1826 - 1864), arr. John Musto
John Musto’s take on Stephen Foster’s essentially simple song is typical of this Brooklyn-born composer at his best. There is a sincerity of approach to the text, a thorough knowledge of counterpoint and an appreciation of the power of dissonances, all wrapped up in music that is easily accessible and yet provocative. Repeated hearings bring great rewards with Musto’s music, as substantiated by his numerous professional awards and concert appearances. During his distinguished career he has won two Emmys, two CINE awards, and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for his orchestral song cycle Dove sta amore. Chanticleer audiences may be familiar with Five Motets, a work which he composed for the group in 2001.
Over the course of Foster’s six verses, Musto turns what might seem to be a rather plain song-with-accompaniment into a richly textured choral work in Ah! May the Red Rose Live Alway! Even so, certain things that seem typical of Foster never change. For instance, the calm, lyrical gait implies a gentle lullaby. The closeness of the harmonic writing draws the listener into the sound-world of a post-Civil War parlor. Musto’s closer involvement with the text is ever at work, however. The “tune” is transposed and transformed -- superseded by harmonic figurations and an imitative density which mirrors the poem’s existential sadness and even outrage. The repeated “Why? Why?” becomes central to Musto’s setting and we realize that those repetitions are as central to this arrangement as anything else. The question “Why must the innocent hide their heads?” begins to lodge itself more firmly in the listener’s ears – and heart. The disarming simplicity of Foster re-asserts itself at the very end. The bits of the piano introduction which Musto has used as a ritornello between the verses have helped us to turn inward with a kind of bittersweet calm. We are left with that lingering sense of “Why?” which is far more unsettling than the simpler, “Oh, too bad…”
Ah! May the red rose live alway
to smile upon earth and sky!
Why should the beautiful ever weep?
Why should the beautiful die?
Lending a charm to every ray,
that falls on her cheeks of light.
Giving the zephyr kiss for kiss,
and nursing the dewdrop bright.
Long may the daisies dance the field,
frolicking far and near!
Why should the innocent hide their heads?
Why should the beautiful die?
Spreading their petals in mute delight,

when morn in its radiance breaks.

Keeping a floral festival
till the night-loving primrose wakes.
Lulled be the dirge in the cypress bough
that tells of departed flowers!
Ah! That the butterfly's gilded wing
fluttered in evergreen bowers!


Sad is my heart for the blighted plants.
Its pleasures are aye as brief.
They bloom at the young year's joyful call,
and fade with the autumn leaf.

Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair – Foster, arr. Gene Puerling
Stephen Foster’s ethereal Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair was written in 1854, just a year after his failed marriage to Jane McDowell. It is widely accepted that the “Jeanie” in the song refers to his ex-wife and his constant love and admiration for her, including her physical beauty. Despite the song’s modern popularity, the sheet music of this song did not benefit Foster during his lifetime. He collected just over $200 in royalties for the first few years after it was published. Due to financial hardship, he sold the rights to Jeanie and other songs to sustain himself. After his death in 1864, the copyright renewals went to his wife Jane and his daughter Marion.
The late Gene Puerling was a master arranger and director in the field of vocal jazz, and his signature style can be heard in arrangements written for and performed by the Hi-Lo’s, Singers Unlimited, the Manhattan Transfer, and Chanticleer, among others. Although Puerling did not receive formal music instruction in his youth, he became a professional working musician at the age of seventeen and displayed monumental skill in blending contemporary pop, calypso, barbershop, and musical theater styles into his arrangements over the course of his musical career. This arrangement showcases Puerling’s typical kaleidoscope of harmonies, which serve as underpinnings to the haunting melody.
I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair,
borne like a vapor on the summer air.
I see her tripping where the bright streams play,
happy as the daisies that dance on her way.

Many were the wild notes her merry voice would pour,
many were the blithe birds that warbled them o’er.
I dream of Jeanie with the light brown hair,
floating like a vapor on the soft summer air.

I long for Jeanie and my heart bows low,
never more to find her where the bright waters flow.

This Marriage – Whitacre
This Marriage, which sets a beautiful love poem by the 13^th century Persian poet Mevlana Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, was composed in 2005 as a gift to Whitacre’s wife, soprano Hila Plitmann, on the occasion of their seventh wedding anniversary. The song is simple and sweet. With only one exception the vocal lines are doubled throughout – soprano with tenor, alto with bass – a musical marriage, as it were. All of the chords are in root position, which support a strong harmonic foundation that moves in parallel motion. The rhythmic flow is constantly dictated by the text and the poem ends with a wordless, and otherworldly, sigh of joy, “I am out of words to describe how spirit mingles in this marriage.”
May these vows and this marriage be blessèd.
May it be sweet milk,
like wine and halvah.
May this marriage offer fruit and shade
like the date palm.
May this marriage be full of laughter,
our every day a day in paradise.
May this marriage be a sign of compassion,
a seal of happiness here and hereafter.
May this marriage have a fair face and a good name,
an omen as welcomes the moon in a clear blue sky.
I am out of words to describe
how spirit mingles in this marriage.

My Blood is Blazing with Desire – Mikhail Glinka (1804 - 1857)
Mikhail Glinka is most known for his epic opera Ivan Susanin (originally titled A Life for the Tsar) and his many symphonic compositions. His songs and romances for solo voice and small ensembles are beloved by singers and audiences for their charm and the seeming simplicity of the beautiful and graceful melodies. Glinka’s stylized simplicity resembles that of Schubert, hiding the mastery of artistic detail behind the unpretentious façade of a salon impromptu.
My Blood is Blazing with Desire, here arranged for a choir of mixed voices, was written in 1838, after Pushkin’s poetic setting of The Song of Songs, and employs sultry chromaticism as the calling card of the passionate Orient. General Orientalism is fused seamlessly here with another convention – a ballroom waltz--which only enhances the song’s allure.
В крови горит огонь желанья,
 My blood is blazing with desire,

Душа тобой уязвлена,
 My stricken soul for you does pine.

Лобзай меня: твои лобзанья
 Oh, kiss me now! Your kisses’ fire

Мне слаще мирра и вина.
 Is sweeter far than myrrh and wine.

Склонись ко мне главою нежной,
 Incline your head to me but softly

И да почию безмятежный,
 And tamed, I’ll linger with you calmly

Пока дохнет веселый день
 Until the cheerful light of day

И двигнется ночная тень. Chases the gloom of night away.

Behold, darkness has fallen – Sergey Taneyev (1856 - 1915)
Sergei Taneyev was a pupil of Tchaikovsky and his close friend, but one could hardly find two men more different in personality, creative approach to music and, subsequently, creative output. “I play Bach gladly,” Tchaikovsky wrote, “but I do not recognize in him (as some do) a great genius. Handel has for me a fourth-rate significance…” Taneyev, on the other hand, had a strong affinity for music of the High Renaissance, the Late Baroque and Viennese Classicism. “The path of Palestrina, Lasso, Bach and Handel divided and ventured northeastward in Taneyev’s works,” wrote the Russian musicologist Boris Asafiev.
Tchaikovsky and Taneyev also differed in their opinion concerning the role inspiration and intuition play in creative work. Tchaikovsky believed that the beginning of any creative process lay in an intuitively found image, born in a moment of inspiration, whereas Taneyev asserted that an observant mind and minutely detailed work should precede (if not replace) inspiration. “It is true that creativity does not exist without inspiration, but in creative moments a man does not produce something that is entirely new; he simply combines what already exists in him and what he had acquired while studying and working,” he wrote in a letter to Tchaikovsky. Taneyev “lived and worked immersed in a world of ideas and abstract concepts,” writes Asafiev.
Indeed, Taneyev, both as a person and as a composer, avoided raw emotionalism and spontaneity of expression. So it is not surprising that in Taneyev’s musical language the dominant place belonged to polyphony. Therein he found the means for expressing both his aesthetical views and his personality. He tried to find the forms that would reflect the general laws of reason and express the eternal and enduring principles of human existence. According to Taneyev, only polyphony, with its unpersonified and supranational principals and devices that did not rely on transient emotions, would give the composer a real opportunity to express the universal as opposed to the subjective; only counterpoint provided “the precise, simple and almost algebraic method” that the composer may use in his search for subjective truth. Finally, technically speaking, only “counterpoint gave each voice the opportunity to produce a melodic line, thus extracting the most out of the musical texture.”
Taneyev’s finest compositions – his cantatas John of Damascus and At the Reading of a Psalm, as well as his numerous choruses – pay tribute to the success of his intellectual approach to composing. His greatest works are unified by a sincere (and characteristic) endeavor to express high aspirations by rising above the feelings of individuals to principles that are universal. Sergey Taneyev wrote thirty-seven secular a cappella choruses and a number of vocal ensembles that are often performed as choruses. Behold, darkness has fallen is one of the choruses from his monumental cycle of twelve choral poems, op. 27, composed on the text of Yakov Polonski (1819-1898). The cycle is considered the pinnacle of Taneyev’s choral output.
Посмотри, какая мгла Behold, darkness has fallen

в глубине долин легла! In the depths of the valleys.

Под ее прозрачной дымкой Under their transparent haze

в темном сумраке ракит In slumbering twilight

тускло озеро блестит. A lake shimmers.

Посмотри, какая мгла Behold, darkness has fallen

в глубине долин легла! In the depths of the valleys.

Бледный месяц невидимкой Behold, a pale, homeless moon,

в тесном сонме сизых туч Moves invisibly through the skies

без приюта в небе ходит Among the host of grey clouds,

и, сквозя на все наводит Glazing everything

фосфорический свой луч. With its phosphorescent light

Посмотри какая мгла Behold, darkness has fallen

в глубине долин легла! In the depths of the valley.

Vocalise – Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943), arr. Elger Niels
Sergei Rachmaninoff composed in a period of Russian romanticism which began in the 1880s and lasted until the Communist takeover in 1917. In terms of choral music, it was a time when dozens of Russian composers, from such prominent figures as Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov to lesser-known “choral specialists” such as Kastalsky, Chesnokov, Gretchaninoff, and Nikolsky, focused their creative energies on texts drawn from the Russian Orthodox liturgy.
By the first decade of the twentieth century, Rachmaninoff was spending his summers at the secluded Ivanovka estate, which was owned by his uncle, Alexander Satin. It is believed that he drew much inspiration from this peaceful and bucolic landscape, which allowed him to escape the demands of urban life and concentrate on the compositional demands facing him during the year. Vocalise, Opus 34, No. 14, consists of a wordless soprano melody (sung on a vowel selected by the performer) superimposed on a hushed and dense choral texture, rife with rich, Romantic harmonies. The ebb and flow of this dialogue is tremendous, for it depicts the versatility and restraint that is prevalent in much of Rachmaninoff’s music. The beauty lies entirely in the soundscape; the absence of words creates an expressive sonic experience that creates tension and release for the listener. The piece was originally written for piano and voice, serving as the final song in the series. Due to its instant success, Rachmaninoff arranged it for orchestra and voice, as well as for orchestra alone.