The concert was a tribute to Robert Bass, the Chorale’s longtime music director and conductor, who died in August at age 55 from complications of amyloidosis, a rare disease in which abnormal proteins accumulate in the body. Mr. Bass, who took up his position at the Chorale in 1980 at 26, had planned this concert to open the choir’s 67th season.

The Chorale sounded in fine form throughout the evening, the first “Dies irae” sung with shattering power after the mournful “Kyrie eleison.”...

by Vivien Schweitzer
New York Times
12/9/08

Randy Woolf’s review of Jukebox in the Tavern of Love
for New Music Connoisseur

Madrigal comedy by Valeria Vasilevski and Eric Salzman, Commissioned and performed by the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble, The Flea Theater, New York City, May-June 2008

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We are in a New York bar during a huge storm and a Con Ed blackout. The bartender, a classic New York type, sets the stage. "We're all in the dark, soaking wet, stranded, strangers in my bar on the worst night of the year. Then, something happened.

...Jukebox in the Tavern of Love is a melding of a modern life confessional scene and the form and manner of a Renaissance madrigal comedy, intricate and reflecting both contemporary sounds and the style's distant origins. 

...The work was commissioned by the Western Wind Vocal Ensemble to go with a 'real' 1605 madrigal comedy (La Barca di Venezia per Padova of Adriano Banchieri) and the two pieces were performed together at the downtown Flea Theater. Each of the six singers in the Western Wind portrays one of the characters, taking turns as soloist while the remaining singers in each piece function as a Greek chorus, creating an emotional backdrop for the individual stories. The first visitor to the bar is the nun who sings the "Dies Irae" -- "Day of Wrath" in honor of the storm -- which turns into a canon with the Italian-American bartender. The others enter one at a time, adding their voices to the mix which adds up to a madrigal of remarkable complexity which somehow never interferes with the simultaneous telling of each character's story. The Broadway dame's tale is next, set as a dance routine to old school Harlem jazz. It loses none of its rhythmic drive as the vocal lines overlap, augment and stretto against each other. When the sextet adds a hocketing handclap accompaniment, the combination suggests that Steve Reich and Cab Calloway have joined forces.

The most touching of the madrigals, "Do You Know What a D.P. Is?" is the rabbi's story of his experience as a displaced person. A Holocaust survivor, he was orphaned at age 3, moved from place to place with no idea of how he would get by without parents, family or home. To the simplest of guitar accompaniments, he sings of a childhood that "had no laughter, that tasted bitter, that had an enemy but not a God."

...The nun then takes her turn, gradually revealing the secret Lesbian inner life of her late aunt. Although the nun never identifies herself as gay, it seems very much implied. She has found letters in a jewel box addressed to her in which the aunt explains how she realized that she was gay from early youth but suffered through the trauma of keeping her feelings secret. Salzman has set this with a tense staccato melody, evoking the repressed inner emotional world of the aunt.

...Next is a paean to lost love, led by the poet. The setting is the closest to its madrigal roots. Each of the singers is given a turn at it, singing over sliding chromatic harmonies that suggest both a barbershop quartet and a Schumann song. This is a showpiece for both Salzman and Vasilevski and a marvel of clarity and contrapuntal reflection.

At its Sunday afternoon concert at the Church of St. Ignatius of Antioch, where it is a resident ensemble, Amuse traced the development of sacred music from the barely adorned piety of medieval English chant to the more florid settings of the German and Italian Baroque.

The program’s central structural elements were three Magnificat settings. The first, a Salisbury chant — an English recasting of Gregorian plainsong — was a picture of simplicity: much of the text is chanted on a single tone, with movement only at the beginning and end of a line. In this arrangement by Alexander Blachly (the director of the group Pomerium), part of the choir provided a drone beneath the chant. It was an ideal way to introduce this choir’s charms, which include a pure, transparent tone and solid ensemble.

The second Magnificat, by John Dunstable, is from the late end of the medieval English repertory, and represents an enormous leap forward: namely, triadic harmony. (The bridge between plainsong and Dunstable was the primitive polyphony of a 12th-century setting of “Stillat in Stellam Radium.”)

A late Renaissance Magnificat would have been in order, but Amuse devoted the Renaissance section of its program to other things: a lovely Agnus Dei by Hans Leo Hassler, a rhythmically complex “Pueri Concinite” by Jacob Handl and a harmonically rich “Duo Seraphim” by Tomás Luis Victoria. So its final Magnificat was an appealingly florid late Baroque version by Nicola Porpora.

Here, and in a handful of short Telemann works, Ms. Boerger and her Amuse singers brought clarity to the music’s comparatively thick textures. But this choir’s real magic is in its delicate balance of serenity and intensity.

by Allan Kozinn
New York Times
9/25/07

Mr. Caines set this work to choruses by Thomas Tallis in honor of the 500th birthday of that great English composer of liturgical music. The contrapuntally complex scores swelled through the space with remarkable clarity and luminosity, thanks to the performance by the Tenebrae 2005 Chorus, conducted by Kristina Boerger, which was stationed at the sides of the space and on the steps of the church's altar....

by Jack Anderson
New York Times
6/18/05

* * *

The very bright lighting design for Tenebrae seemed at odds with its title. Adding to the challenge of achieving balance between the music and the visual elements of this interdisciplinary creation was the captivating performance of the 40 singers assembled by Robb Moss for the "Spem in alium." With expert direction by conductor Kristina Boerger, the ensemble delivered crystal-clear and glorious singing...

by Douglas Frank
The Dance Insider
2005

These days the more adventuresome singers and choirs are taking up the same challenge. They arrange programs that give us food for thought as well as for love or for faith. They move easily across periods and continents. We start to think about history as we listen. It is a form of aural and emotional time travel.

The choral ensemble Cerddorion ("cerddorion" is Welsh for "music") celebrated its 10th anniversary last month with just this kind of program at the Church of St. Luke in the Fields. Under the fine artistic direction of Kristina Boerger, the 28-member group moved from 16th-century Spain to 21st-century North America with passion and discipline....

by Margo Jefferson
New York Times
12/11/04 

...Slow-moving and spare in texture, this Mass [Ockeghem's Missa au Travail Suis] nevertheless thrives on its deeply emotional text setting, and it showed the 13-voice Pomerium at its polished and beautifully blended best.... 

by Allan Kozinn
New York Times
10/05/04

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