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CSOradio
’Tis the season once again: Chanticleer is coming to town. Every year between Thanksgiving and Christmas, the acclaimed 12-person a cappella group takes holiday harmonizing to dazzling heights in packed venues from from coast to coast.
On Dec. 5-6, Chanticleer will be in Chicago for two Symphony Center Presents Special Concerts at the usual venue, Fourth Presbyterian Church on North Michigan Avenue
Spanning centuries and styles, the Grammy-winning ensemble’s program includes everything from custom-arranged Christmas classics and soulful spirituals to Renaissance compositions. In other words, something for just about everyone.
Chanticleer bass Andy Berry spoke recently from San Francisco, where he and his fellow vocalists were busy polishing pieces for their holiday tour and beyond. The six-year veteran discussed auditioning, rehearsing, touring, choosing repertoire and more.
What’s Chanticleer’s audition process like?
First, you send in a pre-screen recording, where you sing a couple of songs and include some vocalese showing off your range. Then we have a second round of auditions, which are in person. This is a whole weekend that basically consists of a recital portion, where everyone has to sing a classical piece and a more popish or jazzy piece for the group, some members of our board or some important people to the organization. The music director and assistant music director also have individual sight-reading sessions and interviews with each auditioner, and we have a couple of social moments, little meals, to get to know the auditioners.
Kind of the crowning day of the weekend is a rehearsal that’s sometimes as long as four hours, where all the members of Chanticleer sing with 15 to 20 auditioners. And eventually, as that day goes on, you start hearing quartets of people and octets of people; it’s very rapid-fire. They’re singing with each other, they’re singing with us. And you might sometimes be watching a decision happening as you see who’s being paired with who more and more. It’s a very interesting weekend. Very intense.
How does the group maintain its extensive touring schedule and what happens if somebody gets sick?
It’s just the 12 of us, and up until 2020, you could probably count on one hand how many times singers had missed a show. And now we’ve learned that maybe it’s not good to sing when someone’s sick. You really want to avoid spreading things and stop outbreaks before they can happen. So rather than replacing people, we’re much more used to covering each other. If somebody sings a solo, maybe we have one or two [other] people within the group who also sing that solo. Or maybe we cut a piece or two, or figure out other adjustments. Maybe we add a different piece we know that has fewer parts. It feels like that kind of creativity is asked of us more often these days.
But the vast majority of the time, we’re doing normal shows with all 12 of us, as opposed to making those adjustments. For tours, if you can get the amount of sleep and hydration that you need, that’s kind of all you can do. I guess it’s also a lot about learning how to pace yourself and not succumbing to that fear of missing out. If other people are being social or going out and you need to spend the night in, or just are too burned out socially, you have to be secure enough to say, “No, I’m going to do my thing and take care of myself.”
How does Chanticleer select repertoire, and what goes into a Chanticleer arrangement?
In the last decade, we’ve continued to be more OK with singing truer pop or more modern-sounding jazz [and other] modern tunes. In terms of choosing repertoire, the really interesting challenge with our group is programming for countertenors, these remarkable high voices. I guess it’s about the tessitura, how high you can stay consistently or how long if you want to spend a whole piece singing high like a cis female soprano might. And so we choose these pieces with narrower ranges; that is our limiting factor as we go after early music and other pre-written pieces.
But the joy of singing in a group like this is that we have the resources to commission works from [outside] composers. A lot of talented folks within our group, including our music director, are very passionate about arranging for us. To be able to tailor these songs to the voices that you have on hand is so much of what makes us sound magical. With songs like Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” or Queen’s “Somebody to Love” and that kind of pop, those arrangements have a bit of a point of view. They’re a little bit complex. They take advantage of how many parts we have and how complex the harmony can be, while also understanding that it’s acoustic singing that needs to sound good in a hall. It’s about editing [pieces] to make them fit this ensemble in a way that hopefully still honors the music.
What’s the rehearsal process like?
When we’re not touring, we’re rehearsing full-time in San Francisco Monday through Friday. We start at 10:30 in the morning and end at 3:30 in the afternoon. So it’s four hours of singing with an hour break in-between. In some ways, these are the most vocally demanding weeks of the job, because you’re singing the pieces over and over again and for hours at a time, as opposed to the concert, two hours at most, and you just sing everything once.
In rehearsal, we don’t really learn notes and rhythms. When we show up on day one, the expectation is that everybody already knows their part and the rhythm. In our case, because we’re unconducted, the bulk of our time is spent on figuring out the logistics of how to keep it all together. There’s a lot of conversation about tempo, and where to look and when and which parts or combinations of parts get to lead through certain moments. It’s about coordinating without a conductor. We also spend a lot of time on tuning and talking about story and emotion, what your point of view is as you sing — especially in pieces that are in foreign languages, or where maybe the whole piece is nonsense syllables.
Do you all leave your egos at the door?
It’s so hard with singing. What’s so tough is that your instrument is you. It’s so personal. And so, in a way, it’s very hard to even hear someone say, “It’s a little flat in this part.” The instinct is to kind of take it like, “Oh, my gosh, there’s something wrong with me.” So is it possible to leave your ego at the door completely? The honest answer is probably not. But you acknowledge that little sting — he’s just telling me I’m a little flat — and kind of smile and know that we’re all here to make great music.
Chanticleer has plenty of laurels to rest on at this point. How do you keep evolving?
In my six years in the group, I think we have spent most of our time working on how we work together. Talking about the music and how we sing the music is really important, but also how we collaborate, how we make sure that of the 12 of us and our music director are feeling heard and are able to contribute ideas. What is so special about this group is how the rehearsal feels something like a little brain trust — some of us have opera backgrounds, some have jazz backgrounds, some have pop backgrounds. And to be able to lean on those strengths when it’s appropriate is the magic of this group.
