San Francisco Girls Chorus fills Kohl Mansion with song

The chorus was the Premier Ensemble, the senior group, of the San Francisco Girls Chorus, a highly acclaimed local training and performing program. Artistic director Valérie Sainte-Agathe chose and conducted a concise program of mostly religious carols, several of them with music written or arranged by the noted English choral composer John Rutter, plus short works by the equally renowned choral composers Ola Gjeilo and David Conte and a couple of folk songs, “Wayfaring Stranger” and “Wild Mountain Thyme.”

The most striking aspect of the evening was the quality of the chorus. These 28 girls, aged between 14 and 18, create a strong vocal sound which frequently achieves the fullness and depth of an adult women’s choir. Many of the arrangements — particularly Rutter’s of “Deck the Halls,” but also many others — are quite complex with melodic and harmonic lines weaving in all directions. This further emphasized the richness of the performance.

Not only had the singers memorized all these pieces and could sing them with full confidence, the ones carrying the words enunciated them clearly and audibly despite the vocal competition from wordless harmony and descant parts. That they could articulate these words so well while singing with restraint and beauty — no exaggerating the plosives or hissing the sibilants — was their most awesome achievement.

Only in a couple of numbers did the voices rise high enough to be piercing. Then the pitch and volume were enough to overload the sensitive acoustics of Kohl’s Great Hall, a tiny venue not used to coping with such full-throated choral work. The rest of the time, the chorus was solid and deep enough to avoid any acoustic problems. The hall rang clearly with the sound of these voices.

About half the items were unaccompanied. The rest had quiet and tasteful accompaniment on harp by Kristin Lloyd and on cello by Angela Lee, who was a late substitute performer.

The traditional English carol “The Holly and the Ivy,” in an arrangement by Margaret Shelley Vance, had numerous solo vocal parts by members of the chorus. Additional variety in vocal timbre in this carol was provided by baritone Bradley Kynard joining in, which he also did on “The First Nowell,” for which Sainte-Agathe also encouraged the audience to sing along. Kynard also had one solo number, accompanied by Lloyd, a strong presentation of the extremely wide-ranging melody of the carol “O Holy Night” by Adolphe Adam.

With additional numbers ranging from the French traditional carol “Noël Nouvelt” to the Irish “Wexford Carol” to the inevitable closer of “Silent Night” by Franz Gruber, the concert gave a warm and toasty feeling to an audience privileged to hear a choir which, at least most of the time, sounded as exquisite in close quarters as it would have in a larger hall, with the added vividness of a close-in venue.

The next concert in the Kohl series is Jan. 12. The Reverón Piano Trio will feature music by Latin American composers including Astor Piazzola, Teresa Carreño and Gabriela Lena Frank.