Chanticleer to Debut WITHOUT A SONG Program In 2024-25 Season

Multiple Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Chanticleer will kick off its new season of performances at home in the Bay Area and on tour across the U.S. with the new “Without a Song” program, which explores music’s power throughout the ages. Repertoire includes Medieval and Renaissance motets by Francesco Landini and Orlando di Lasso, a new work by Grammy-nominated composer Ayanna Woods, the group’s 2023–24 composer-in-residence, and a new version of the jazz standard “Without a Song,” arranged by Stacey V. Gibbs. Music Director Tim Keeler elaborates:

"Part of what makes our job so beautiful and invigorating is getting to share the joy and power of music with audiences around the world. We feel their excitement from the stage. In ‘Without a Song,’ we lean into that joy and consider just how essential music is to our everyday life. It provides us with inspiration, comfort, tears, and smiles."
Ayanna Woods’s music was also featured last season in a new program called “Music of a Silent World,” which centered on Majel Connery’s The Rivers are our Brothers, a song cycle on ecological responsibility. Woods’s “I miss you like I miss the trees” dealt with the subject of wildfires.
 
Two other unique programs – the Indian music-focused “Choodandi” and “Chanticleer and the Fox: An Evening of Renaissance Music Theater” – will be performed in Bay Area venues in the spring, and the group’s iconic holiday program, “A Chanticleer Christmas,” will tour from coast to coast. As Gramophone declared in its five-star review of Chanticleer’s latest album, On a Clear Day: “The group's make up has changed often in the almost half-century of its existence, but the quality and commitment they bring to this recording must have been present from the beginning. … The entire programme is delivered with the skilful aplomb one expects from these voices.”

“A Chanticleer Christmas”

Chanticleer performs its beloved holiday program, “A Chanticleer Christmas,” throughout the month of December. Featured on a PBS special and multiple appearances on NBC’s Today show, the program – from its opening candlelit chant procession to its triumphant gospel conclusion – hearkens back to some of the group’s most cherished traditions and the original vision of its founder, Louis Botto. Tour highlights include performances at New York City’s Church of St. Ignatius Loyola (Dec 6 & 8), Chicago’s Symphony Center (Dec 10), and Los Angeles’s Walt Disney Concert Hall (Dec 17), as well as concerts throughout the choir’s Bay Area home. At the height of the pandemic, when live performances were out of the question, the group released the Christmas program on the album Chanticleer Sings Christmas, which was lauded by Classics Today for “the beauty and sumptuous blend the choir achieves … and the seasoned performance style that brings each selection to its fullest expression.” It joins a catalogue of more than 40 albums, released over four decades, which have sold well over a million copies and won multiple Grammy awards.
“Choodandi”

Later in the season, Chanticleer performs a program titled “Choodandi,” curated by Chanticleer tenor Vineel Garisa Mahal. Featuring music by composers ranging from Thyagaraja – a composer of classical Carnatic music – to contemporary songwriter Sid Sriram, the program will explore not only how Indian music has changed and evolved, but also how perceptions of this “perfect” and “true” art form can change. Keeler comments:
"’Choodandi’ will be Chanticleer's first foray into Indian music. We are excited and grateful to have Vineel leading us through this beautiful and wide-ranging repertoire, and helping us hone the genre's unique subtleties of vocal production, ornamentation, and style."
“Chanticleer and the Fox: An Evening of Renaissance Music Theater”

Based on the Caldecott-winning children’s book Chanticleer and the Fox, illustrated by Barbara Cooney, and hearkening back to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the story of the rooster Chanticleer outwitting the cunning fox to save his barnyard friends will be accompanied by the ensemble Chanticleer performing a soundtrack of Renaissance madrigals and motets. Performed in five cities surrounding Chanticleer’s Bay Area home, the concert will be suitable for children of all ages (June 7–13).

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