Vocal group Chanticleer glad to be back in the yuletide swing of things

The holidays are a season of celebration, and for the Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer, that’s especially the case.

The 12-member a cappella group is set for some 25 holiday concerts between Thanksgiving and Christmas in its home base of San Francisco and across the country, including an SCP Special Concert on Dec. 10, this year at Orchestra Hall, instead of the usual Fourth Presbyterian Church.

Chanticleer has performed a dozen times at the Ravinia Festival since 1997. But it is best known in the Chicago area for its Christmas concerts, which have been an annual tradition since 2000 (except during the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020).

“We love coming to Chicago, and every year, our Christmas tour starts on the East Coast, and we wind our way back,” said Music Director Tim Keeler. “We would never miss a stop in Chicago.”

A big change for Chanticleer came with the August 2020 appointment of Keeler as the ensemble’s sixth artistic leader. He sang with the group in 2017-2018 and served as conductor of the men’s choir at the University of Maryland, where he completed his doctorate in choral conducting this spring. “Nobody had a playbook for COVID, so in some ways, it was a level playing field, but it was crazy to start a new job in the middle of it all,” he said.

In 2022, Chanticleer released “On a Clear Day,” with works by Mason Bates, Augusta Read Thomas and others. The disc consists mostly of works commissioned by the group in the last 10-15 years that it had not previously recorded. Also included are compositions by composers, Stephen Paulus and Steven Sametz. “The Chanticleer [music] library is extensive,” Keeler said. “One of the thrills for me as music director is going through the filing cabinets and finding all these amazing pieces by some really brilliant composers.”

Founded in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, the ensemble has typically combined Renaissance music with contemporary repertoire, including a vast array of arrangements and works it has commissioned. Along the way, it has received such honors as the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming. “Finding those nuggets of continuity across the centuries is really exciting, and one of the great ways to do that is to contrast early music with contemporary music,” Keeler said.

Following that history of mixing past and present, this season’s program, “A Chanticleer Christmas,” includes early hymns and carols in a variety of arrangements, selections from Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols, the group’s annual performance of the beloved Ave Maria by Franz Biebl, plus, a selection of contemporary Christmas songs and a concluding selection of Christmas spirituals, another cherished Chanticleer tradition.

The second half will feature later classical works and traditional and modern carols, including arrangements of “O Come, All Ye Faithful” and “Merry Christmas, Darling,” which was popularized in the 1970s by the pop group the Carpenters. The concert ends with a medley of Christmas spirituals arranged by Joseph Jennings, a former Chanticleer music director.