Review: Kinnara puts on a dazzling display of chamber choir singing

Kinnara opened its 15th season Saturday at Emory University’s Glenn Memorial Church by revisiting music performed along its journey to become perhaps Atlanta’s best professional chamber choir. The ensemble came together in New Jersey with graduates from the Westminster Choir College at Rider University and officially relocated to Atlanta in 2019 — although they’re flexible in how many singers perform in a given concert and where they live. 

Conducted by Artistic Director J.D. Burnett, Kinnara’s exceptionally well-balanced singing and polished delivery has led to a few of the most compelling local shows in recent years, from modern-day classics (The Little Matchgirl Passion) to music inspired by spiritual pilgrimage. It’s no exaggeration to say that Kinnara’s savvy programming and delivery has us thinking that we’re living in a glorious era of chamber choir composition. 

But paired with any cultural success story is the business aspect: Who pays for this great art? Notably, Saturday’s performance was the first-ever concert that Kinnara presented on its own, doing all its own publicity and selling its own tickets — and not as a part of someone else’s concert series. It was described as a threshold moment for Kimmara’s future. 

At the evening’s center, the 24 singers sang a ravishingly poignant performance of Frank Martin’s “Mass for Unaccompanied Double Choir,” deeply spiritual music with an unexpected backstory. 

The Swiss composer, raised in a Calvinist family in Geneva, wrote the Mass in the mid-1920s, then put it away in a drawer for 40 years. As Martin later explained, he “felt that religious fervor should remain private and not be influenced by public opinion” and thus he was “afraid it would be judged on a purely aesthetic level.” 

So it was listed in his catalog of works but never heard. Several decades passed. Then a German choirmaster effectively tricked the composer, asking him to merely “peruse” the score. Martin was finally ready to share his work with the world and, with perfect timing, the German choir received permission, in 1963, to give its world premiere. The composer’s renown has yet to catch up to the high quality and creative variety of his music, although the choral world has long embraced his Mass. It’s been performed and recorded countless times.

Kinnara first sang “Martin’s Mass” in 2016, and Saturday it felt like the core of their repertoire, playing to all of their emotional and technical strengths. Set to texts from the standard Latin Mass, Martin’s music feels ancient and modern at once, where modal harmonies and inspiration from medieval plainchant are blended with astringent sounds and a variety of textures.

The opening kyrie, so haunting and lovely, is at times earthbound or lofty and pushes to the edge of sonic saturation — a very early-20th device. The what-I-believe credo was highlighted by a halo, a blinding light of purity. There’s so much variety in the sections of this credo, and Burnett and his singers pushed each toward maximum contrast which, somehow, made it sound all the more unified. An all-but-flawless delivery and so much more. 

Kinnara opened with 21st century-sounding music. Kinnara first performed Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds’ “Salutation” in 2017, the year it was written. Like Eric Whitacre’s “I will wade out,” also performed on numerous Kinarra programs over the years, “Salutation” is vertical in its harmonies. In essence, the vocal sections (sopranos, altos, tenors, basses) don’t sing independent lines; everyone mostly sings the same words at the same time, and the music flows as a kaleidoscope of exquisitely prismatic chords, one dazzling syllable after another. For the listener, it’s a bit like a time-lapsed video of light streaming through a giant stained-glass window across an afternoon, compressed into three glorious minutes. 

Later on the program, they contrasted this modern-day push toward extreme “vertical” harmonies with the much older “horizontal” lines of Renaissance polyphony. Tomas Luis de Victoria’s “Vidi speciosam,” which Kinnara first performed in 2015, is a tapestry of voices, each weaving in and out of the others — a very different sonic experience, perfect in its own way.

Shorter works from Kinnara’s repertoire filled out the bulk of the program. Sadly, the audience was likely clueless about the words since there were no song texts in the program booklet (likely as a cost-saving measure). Instead, we were invited to scan a QR code to read notes and texts and artists’ bios on our phones, a potentially obnoxious solution. Who wants to hold up their glowing screen in a darkened concert space? Worse, who wants to see someone else’s screen a few rows in front of them? This invites distracted behavior and multitasking from the audience.

Near the top of the evening, we heard English composers writing folk-inspired music about flowers — Gerald Finzi’s “I have loved flowers that fade” and Benjamin Britten’s “The Ballad of Green Broom.” Traditional American music came at the end, with a Negro spiritual, “I’m Going Home” in a lush, 1976 arrangement by Undine Smith Moore and James Erb’s arrangement of “Shenandoah.” 

Here as elsewhere, Burnett and his singers were wonderfully persuasive, offering what can seem like the best choral singing around.      

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Pierre Ruhe was the founding executive director and editor of ArtsATL. He’s been a critic and cultural reporter for the Washington Post, London’s Financial Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and was director of artistic planning for the Alabama Symphony Orchestra. He is publications director of Early Music America.