Kitka honors Ukraine with its Wintersongs in Menlo Park

The songs were mostly carols but few are religious carols in the sense of the English and French songs with which most listeners are familiar. In Ukraine, as artistic director Shira Cion explained early in the concert, the seasonal motto is “a generous evening,” in reference to the bounty of the feasts. Many of the carols reflect that, particularly the encore, a Bulgarian equivalent of “The Twelve Gifts of Christmas” in which each day adds up a new bird or animal to eat, all of them mimed by the singers each time they appear.

One popular song which begins as a religious carol ends up with everybody’s wish for Christmas morning, chocolates! That’s “shokoladni” in Ukrainian, delivered with a strong emphasis making this one word easy for linguistically challenged listeners to recognize.

Some of the songs are based on folklore, usually incorporated into Christian traditions. Some are tributes to Christmas season guests — the moon, the stars, the rain, the cuckoo bird (represented by bird whistle calls carried by the singers), the falcon (a Ukrainian symbol of courage in adversity and thus especially meaningful now). Some are more general, such as the New Year’s toast to prosperity that’s the one number all the listeners would recognize, perhaps the best-known piece of all Ukrainian music: Mykola Leontovych’s “Shchedryk,” more familiar in English as “The Carol of the Bells.” This was framed in Kitka’s performance by a penitential chant in Church Slavonic.

Kitka consists of nine singers, all dressed in matching costumes of eastern European folk origin. They usually sing without instruments, occasionally inserting a drone on a small positive organ or a few inconspicuous hand drums or other small percussion. Their voices tend toward the high end of women’s range, a few of them harsh and nasal. This bracing sound takes some getting used to, as do their unusual harmonies. This is not a typical women’s choir by any means.

Whether arranged for all nine voices or for smaller numbers as few as two, most of their songs begin with a single voice and then expand, at once or one by one, to the larger ensemble. A few of their pieces use counterpoint, multiple lines moving simultaneously, including one canonic number and another with two carol melodies and a rhythmic backing all going on at once. Most, however, use harmonic underpinning to enrich the sound. This is only sometimes the thirds-based harmonies familiar in Western music. Some Kitka songs employ close harmonies of considerable dissonance. Others use stark-sounding wide harmonies.

However strange or unusual these sounds may be, the arrangements, mostly prepared by their own members or taken from their source material, are of considerable imagination and variety. They serve to keep interesting a long program of unfamiliar music in languages most listeners don’t know. So does the great talent of the singers at knowing their material, at putting it across with enthusiasm and in technical command of their singing.

Kitka also performs new and contemporary music. Its next performance will be of a new vocal-theater work by Slovenian composer Karmina Silec titled “Baba: The Life and Death of Stana.” This will be held at ZSpace in San Francisco’s Mission District on Feb. 23-26.