State Senator Mark Leno honors composer Kathleen McGuire, one of the
composers of Street Requiem, and singer Frederica con Stade, one of the
performers, prior to the SF premiere of the work. Photo credit: SFist
Street Requiem: Despite being nominally retired, Alameda resident and famed diva Frederica von Stade, aka
Flicka,
still shares her big talent and bigger heart for worthy causes. Last
week, she brought her voice to a choir of singers recruited from the
homeless ranks of San Francisco for the West Coast premiere of
Street Requiem, an oratorio celebrating people who lived and died on the streets. The evening supported
Singers of the Street,
an organization funded in 2010 by Kathleen McGuire, who with her fellow
Australian Andy Payne and Jonathon Welch, also composed the music for
the requiem. Singers of the Street is a choir for homeless people, who
get a sense of purpose and achievement from participating in the choir, a
community to be part of, and provide a positive and human experience of
homelessness to audiences. They accept
donations.
We thought we should check in our cynicism at the door for a concert
where the betterment of humankind is achieved by singing together.
Heart-warming stories don't necessarily make great art. This was
reinforced by a little welcome pitch from Rev. Megan Rohrer, whose
congregation hosts the rehearsals and who asked for our leniency for the
singers, and extolled their "courage to sing the wrong note." And it
turns out that these guys are pretty darn good and would match any
amateur choir in the city. No need for indulgence on the audience's
part.
The concert was set in two halves, the first devoted to covers by
Singers of the Street, and the second to the Street Requiem, with Flicka
and a bunch of experienced singers. The acronym for the organization
is SOS, and the first song was appropriately the Beatles' "Help"; it was
followed by calls for solidarity and songs of positive affirmation, and
they all took a pretty emotional color from the context. The performers
of SOS literally sang their hearts out: you could hardly imagine
performers giving more into a performance.
As for the
Street Requiem, it is composed of ten sections,
each with a different color, re-interpreting the typical Requiem format
with Kyrie, Gloria, Dies Irae, Agnus Dei, etc, but updated with current
texts in different languages. The opener gets Middle Eastern scales, an
Irish folk song is appropriated for the ninth movement, percussive South
African beats in the eighth. It is meant to be inclusive of all
cultures. Some movements are of more indeterminate origins, but were
always rooted in tonal harmonies. Flicka gets the most beautiful melody
in the Pie Jesu. The orchestration sometimes feels a bit studious, it
could be a bit more free and unpredictable; but there is a lot of
generosity in the writing of the score and the energy of the Gloria is
contagious. The
Street Requiem has been performed in Australia,
Dallas, and will be sung in Seattle, and we hope the composers keep
staging it and tweaking it, it is a piece of great emotional power. And a
testament that you can better the lives of people through singing.
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