Shine a Light: The 18th Street Singers at First Trinity Lutheran Chuch, January 20, 2012

“You are either a really morbid crowd or very good supporters of friends and family,” Benjamin Olinsky told the audience assembled Friday night to hear the winter concert of the 18th Street Singers, for whom Olinsky serves as artistic director. Titled “In These, Our Darkest Hours,” the program embraced the bleakness of midwinter rather than ignoring it or trying to repel it with cuteness. But, of course, you only realize that any set of hours was the darkest after said darkness has lifted, and the collection of pieces presented Friday reflected that as well.

Benjamin Olinsky in greener seasons, from the 18th Street Singers website

Francis Poulenc’s “Quatre Motets pour le Temps de Noel” (“Four Motets for Christmastime”) and “Un Soir de Neige” (“A Night of Snow”) led off the first and second halves of the program and received some of the evening’s most satisfying performances. In the sacred work, the 18th Streeters crisply rendered the text — even though a few lines of Latin were missing from the program, I was able to keep up — while making a lovely sound that easily filled the warm acoustic of First Trinity Lutheran Church. The basses, in particular, sounded like a force of nature here and throughout the concert, a palpable presence deep in the harmonies yet capable of nimbly navigating melodies when called for.

The Gregorian chant inspiration in the first of the four motets came across with appropriate gravity, and when the severity and wonder of the first three motets gave way to joy in the finale, “Hodie Christus natus est” (“Christ is born today”), the chorus’ sound lifted up too. “Un Soir de Neige,” conducted by assistant music director Nick Bath, also showed the singers at the top of their game, vividly limning complex harmonies and giving life to the wandering sufferer depicted in the texts and Poulenc’s settings thereof.

This being an 18th Street Singers concert, classical mingled with other genres, but all the pieces were cannily chosen to reflect the theme of the evening, making for a tight, focused program. Felix Mendelssohn’s “Richte mich, Gott,” doesn’t ever seem fully committed to the laments with which it begins before finding light and hosannas, but the 18th Street Singers made the journey enjoyable all the same. Samuel Barber’s “Agnus Dei” sounded just distant enough from its source, his Adagio for Strings, to transcend the cliche the latter has become and accumulate great power from its implacable buildup, well-managed by Olinsky. These pieces bracketed warm performances of two traditional hymns, “Hark, I Hear the Harps Eternal” and “We Gather Together,” and the juxtaposition flattered all of the music.

Some flubs made this concert a little less satisfying than last year’s winter edition. The soloist in “We Gather Together” could not be heard; a few entrances came in staggered fashion rather than in unison; and, most significantly, one or two of the sopranos could not comfortably hit the very highest notes they were called upon to sing, resulting in some unfelicitous screeching during the “Agnus Dei” and in a couple other pieces.

In addition, the transition to the skein of nonclassical pieces that ended the program felt awkward, with the finely grained nervousness and exhaustion of “Un Soir de Neige” followed by a labored “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” “Deep River,” though, leaned on those wonderful basses to make a strong impact, and while at the time I was not wholly convinced by the arrangement of U2′s “MLK,” it’s grown more compelling in my memory. The concert closed with “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” which was as vigorous as you could want and also provided the perfect closer for the program.

Though this concert had the benefit of texts and translations in the program, Olinsky, assistant directors Bath and Sarah Redmond, and other chorus members took turns talking about the pieces before singing. Even though some of these remarks could have been pared by a sentence or two, they went a long way toward making the concert feel warm and personal, which (along with good singing) is what you want when you duck out of the bitter cold January wind to hear a chorus. The concert repeats tonight; tickets are $10, so if you like the idea of wallowing in darkness for a while before emerging into musical light, it’s worth stopping by.

Updated to add Other People’s Perspectives: Michael Lodico.

From Adams Morgan to Johannes Brahms: The 18th Street Singers at First Trinity Lutheran Church, January 22, 2011

It’s a cliché to laud the robust choral-music scene of the DMV, but seriously, if you want to sing in a group and sound awesome, this is the place to be. Case in point: The 18th Street Singers, which, their website informs us, was formed because its members “were eager for a serious musical outlet that would also fulfill the social and time constraints of life as young adults in the District. Hearing none, we proceeded to build our own.” They formed in 2004, and this spring they’ll be singing at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, followed by a Kennedy Center concert in June. Such is the way things go here.

Most of the 18th Streeters’ concerts present a mix of genres: classical, spirituals, world music, contemporary pieces in a choral vein, etc. Their concert Saturday night at First Trinity Lutheran Church, though, emphasized European art music; indeed, artistic director Benjamin Olinsky said this was “a concert that brings together the best works by the best composers for choir of all time.” This was clearly hyperbole, as “Jesu, meine Freude” was not included, but the concert did provide a nice cross-section of a cappella works to display these choristers’ talents.

They sing well. They have a nice tonal blend, they listen to each other, they pronounce texts clearly. Most of all, though, the 18th Street Singers showed on Saturday that they are amateurs in the best sense: they love singing, and want you to love it too. Olinsky and assistant music directors Ron Lee and Sarah Redmond, trading off conducting duties throughout, went for vivid effects: sharp pauses, big fortissimos (sometimes a little too big, and thus rough), pianissimos that made you lean forward in your seat. Yet the subtle harmonic details of (for example) two sacred pieces by Anton Bruckner got plenty of attention as well, and everyone involved seemed to greatly enjoy shaping a melody, an approach that works across many genres.

They’re helped by First Trinity, which has lovely wood-and-glass-aided acoustics and an intimate nave; on Saturday the 44-person choir, in a semicircle in front of the altar, seemed almost to surround the audience in the pews. The dramatic stereo effect pumped up the impact of Robert Schumann’s Four Songs for Double Choir, which opened the program — you could hear clearly each group shaping its own harmonies, responding to the other’s development of the melodic line. That acoustic also helped the choir when it lathered a warm, luxuriant sound on a melody; sometimes I wished for a little more diversity of tone production, but that sound gave a lot of pleasure Saturday evening.

Presenting the classix a little differently than normal seems to come naturally to this group of young professional types. (Note: I am technically a young professional, but in fact I have the crankiness of someone twice my age.) For example, before the last piece on the program, the choristers presented Olinsky with a large bottle of Disaronno Amaretto; the liquor’s ridiculous commercial (which you should really watch at that link) features the smoooooth utterance “Disaronno…on the rocks,” which Olinsky uses as a direction to the choir to achieve that warm, luxuriant sound. This is the type of thing Robert Shafer just isn’t going to tell you.

More substantively, the program contained no notes on the music; instead, members of the group stepped forward before each work and said a few words. The dude who thought that the plural noun describing Franz Schubert’s art songs was “lieders” (even Wikipedia knows how that plural works) threw me off before a performance of “Die Nacht.” But another chorister’s tale of getting her baby to giggle while practicing Jacob Handl’s “Ascendit Deus” made a perfect prelude to a giddily spirited run-through of that piece. However, I must argue that choirs who are performing songs in other languages owe it to the audience to give some idea of what the text is about, rather than providing a quick bio of the composer. And yes, everything on the program was referred to as a “song,” which was a bit weird for the settings of sacred texts.

Yet these performances showed a group that takes what they’re singing plenty seriously. For me, the highlight of the concert was Brahms’ “Warum is das Licht gegeben dem Mühseligen,” which sets passages from the story of Job and commentaries thereon. Here the opening cries of “Warum?” (“Why?”) resounded through First Trinity, the pauses after opening up space to wonder, and the 18th Street Singers ably navigated Brahms’ intricate settings, breathing musical life into questions that have no satisfying answers. Near the end of the program, they sang “Shenandoah,” apparently a 18th Street standard, and less complex music rang with the same wonder and feeling. Both indicated that the 18th Street Singers are ready to become another star in the DMV’s choral firmament.