The Summer Singers have become both larger and smaller over the past couple of summers. Founded in 1986 as a small chamber choir, the group has since provided almost annual opportunities for members of some of the Twin Cities area’s multiple outstanding choirs to sing in summer.
As of last year, it’s now two ensembles, one smaller — a 22-voice professional chamber choir called Sol — and one larger: an amateur choir of 38 that can swell its ranks to 60.
On Thursday evening, Sol started its second season by wandering around the historic environs of the Turnblad Mansion at Minneapolis’ American Swedish Institute, serenading visitors with Renaissance madrigals and Fleetwood Mac, percussive Filipino choral music and 20th-century English fare.
Having followed them from room to room to courtyard during this promenading performance, I can tell you that this new chamber version of the group is clearly much more than an opportunity for some choral nerds to keep their voices sharp in the off-season. Sol has a solid sound, its vocal textures able to draw you in with subtlety before blowing your hair back with powerful fortissimos. And, as its repertoire suggests, it’s quite a versatile group.
Led by conductor Adam Reinwald — the leader of local choir Kantorei who’s still best remembered as a longtime member of the low-voice group Cantus — Sol has singers from such Twin Cities-based choirs as the Minnesota Chorale, the Minnesota Opera Chorus, the National Lutheran Choir and Singers in Accord. And, this summer, they’re devoting their concerts to the birds.
The repertoire of this year’s concerts is avian-centered, with all 17 songs on the program taking for their topic the traits or actions of particular breeds of bird, from the cuckoos of 19th-century English composer Robert Lucas Pearsall to the sparrows of Renaissance composer John Bartlet to the “Blackbird” of the Beatles. And it was all delivered with a fine blend of gravitas and breeziness, spirit and sweetness.
While the repertoire bounced between centuries, it was the songs stemming from (and clearly descended from) the Renaissance madrigal tradition that made the strongest impression. John Bennet’s brightly colored “For the Hearne and Duck” just about raised the roof at the highest point of the Turnblad Mansion, while Charles Villiers Stanford’s old-school tune, “Sweet Love for Me,” was the most ebullient music heard all evening.
Some solo opportunities also were seized with enthusiasm, particularly bass Simon Pick’s turn on a gorgeous version of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “The Turtle Dove” and Katherine Castille sonorously whistling during “Blackbird.”
