The two worst places for a person’s cellphone to go off, ranked: One, in the hush before a musical performance. Two, church.
And both at once? On Friday night, audience members visibly recoiled when St. Josaphat in Lincoln Park reverberated not with the sounds of “Coming Out of the Dark,” the concert by the ensemble Chicago a cappella seconds away from starting, but the clangorous jangle of an iPhone. But comprehension quickly dawned on those in attendance when mezzo and a cappella member Emily Price answered the offending phone.
“I’ve been stuck in my apartment. Everything’s been canceled. I don’t know what to do,” she said into her phone, her voice pinched with anxiety.
Then, a baritone took his own “call” from a back pew — more of the same. Before long, the overlapping, one-sided conversations of eight a cappella singers snowballed throughout the sanctuary, each echoing conversations that clogged phone lines in spring 2020. I haven’t seen anyone for weeks. What are they saying about masks now? I can’t take it anymore.
“Coming Out of the Dark” was, for the most part, a poignant portrait of that breaking point — its despairing depths, its probing self-reflections, and even its glimmers of humor (however pitch-black). The works on the program were largely selected by a cappella members, chosen for their special personal significance over the past couple years. Others selected works they’d yearned to sing with their beloved a cappella during shelter-in-place, only now getting the chance to do so.
But “Coming Out of the Dark” buried its lede. Friday’s concert also featured premieres by two of Chicago a cappella‘s HerVoice Emerging Women Composers competition winners
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, Edna Yeh and Sarai Hillman. Workshopped with mentor composers Stacy Garrop and Zanaida Robles over the last calendar year, those works stood in relief against the concert’s more saccharine second half.Setting William Wordsworth’s famous poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is a major — and promising — aesthetic leap for the Oakland, California-based Yeh, if her online catalog is any indication. The work is an impressive feat of text-painting: Performers can sing lines slightly staggered to create a hazy, pillowing effect. The ebb and flow of the text clouds — with just a few choice lines about solitude sung in the clear by gleaming mezzo-soprano Chelsea Lyons — rightly latches onto the ephemerality of Wordsworth’s original, not its pretty scenery.
Hillman, a recent graduate of Georgia State University, movingly introduced her “Psalm 59:16 C. Safety & Refuge”: Losing her parents at a young age inspired her to compose a work about searching for refuge one may never find. Indeed, her “Refuge” is a hard-won thing, and never quite won — it’s fragmented and ever-shifting, winking with vanishing upward glissandi and hard-to-land pitch unisons. The technical labor of the performers mirrors the labor of the search, and their few moments of respite: At the cutoff of one resplendent, long-sought harmony, the St. Josaphat sanctuary rang right back, its most resonant response of the evening. A few audience members pushed themselves from the pews to give Hillman a much-deserved standing ovation. More from this prodigious talent soon, please.
Many a cappella singers seconded Hillman’s vulnerability over the course of the program. Tenor Trevor Mitchell described being racially profiled during post-rehearsal drives home and while shopping; his crooning rendition of “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free” — in a soulful and surprisingly doo-woppy arrangement by the late Chicago composer Margaret Bonds and recorded by Leontyne Price — was both plangent and poised. In the evening’s rawest moment, soprano Kristin Lelm introduced her selected choral work: “Speak,” written for her by her brother, Jeremy Bell, after Lelm broke her silence about enduring years of abuse. At the end of the still, gently consoling work, both siblings wiped tears from their eyes.
Lelm was still composing herself when soprano Cari Plachy launched into an overworn truism about collective loss of control during the pandemic. Unfortunately, that wasn’t an evening anomaly: “Coming Out of the Dark” smothered other solemn moments with hasty segues, clichés, and overall cornballism. (However beloved, Anders Edenroth’s “Chili Con Carne” is a hard pass from me for the line “Don’t forget the Mexican spices / Without them, you won’t get the flavor of sunshine” alone.) A staticky mic, dripping wet acoustic, and far-flung speaker setup also meant St. Josaphat audiences had to strain to hear singers introduce their pieces — hopefully a nonissue in repeats at different venues.
Each half of the program led with movements from Thomas Tallis’s Renaissance-era “Lamentations of Jeremiah,” its Latin text depicting a “lonely … city that was full of people.” Chicago a cappella sang the first of these, “Aleph,” with a flesh-and-blood ardor that conveyed impregnability and fragility in equal measure; the second, “Daleth,” was less emotionally and musically attuned in comparison, though it showcased airtight ensemble work among the ensemble’s middle voices.
But I keep coming back to that moment of suspension before Tallis’s “Aleph” — or before any singing, really — as Price’s ring tone pealed and we briefly, uneasily hovered between live performance and silence, unsure which side of the fence we would tumble down. For all its quirks, “Coming Out of the Dark” does what it set out to do: lament the collective music-making we’ve lost, the careers stifled and stunted, and the parts of ourselves ripped away in the wreckage. May we never mourn such a loss again in our lifetime.
“Coming Out of the Dark” repeats 8 p.m. Feb. 19 at Pilgrim Congregational Church, 460 Lake Street, Oak Park; 4 p.m. Feb. 20, at Wentz Concert Hall, 171 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville; 7 p.m. March 3, streamed live online. Tickets and more information at chicagoacappella.org.
Hannah Edgar is a freelance writer.
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