A Chanticleer Christmas

the vibe

WELCOME TO OUR 49TH BAY AREA SEASON! A Chanticleer Christmas is a treasured holiday tradition, bringing the beauty and wonder of the season to audiences near and far. By the glow of candlelight, voices soar in harmony, weaving together centuries of music that illuminate the joy, mystery, and spirit of Christmas. From moments of hushed reverence to rousing celebration, this beloved program offers a musical embrace of the season’s most cherished sentiments. Giovanni Valentini (c.1582–1649) was an early Baroque composer who held one of the most prestigious posts of his day as Hofkapellmeister for Ferdinand II, the Holy Roman Emperor. He was an organist and keyboard virtuoso who is said to have mastered the  clavicymbalum universale , an enharmonic keyboard with 19 keys per octave. Rivaling his contemporaries Heinrich Schütz and Claudio Monteverdi, Valentini’s compositions are full of bold harmonic shifts and rhythmic daring: unrelated keys and extreme chromaticism appear from nowhere, while obscure time signatures keep musicians and audiences on their toes.  In this concert, Chanticleer teams up with the baroque ensemble ACRONYM to present modern-day premieres of some of Valentini’s most thrilling vocal and instrumental works. Repertoire includes six  Litaniae Lauretanae , various motets, and some of Valentini’s most daring instrumental sonatas, nearly all of it unheard since the seventeenth century. Chanticleer explores humanity’s eternal longing for the ideal: visions of a perfect world, perfect love, or perfect future. Through Chanticleer’s signature blend of voices and with repertoire spanning centuries, we reveal a paradise longed for, imagined, and fleetingly glimpsed through song. Included are songs of praise by Renaissance composers Jean Mouton and Juan Gutiérrez de Padilla, as well as sacred manifestations of paradise, with Darius Milhaud’s “Psalm 121” and Bobby McFerrin’s “The 23rd Psalm.” Perfect love, both earthly and divine, finds expression in Giovanni Valentini’s “Adoramus Te, Christe” and Jean Sibelius’s epic Finnish love song, “Rakastava.” A collection of contemporary songs rounds out the program, including arrangements of Richard Evans’s “Journey to Recife” and Manuel Sánchez Acosta’s “Paraiso Soñado,” which remind us that sometimes the only thing standing between us and paradise is a plane, a train, or a dream.