Irvine Camerata Tunes Up : UCI Fine Arts Dean Drills 24 Singers in Preparation for Debut Friday

They sit on risers, relaxed and informal, wearing T-shirts or blouses, jeans or shorts, tennis shoes or thongs. They may look like mere mortals, but when they open their mouths, they can sound like angels.

Robert Hickok, dean of fine arts at UC Irvine, is rehearsing his new 24-member Irvine Camerata, which makes its debut on Friday at the campus Fine Arts Concert Hall.

The singers are rehearsing music from the golden age of polyphony--Renaissance and early Baroque works by Lassus, Victoria, Byrd, Schutz and others. The musical lines float weightlessly, the purity of tone transfixes the listener.

But to get to heaven, Hickok puts the singers through a little hell first.

For more than a hour, he concentrates on the 67 bars of Lassus’ motet “Salve Regina.”

First a complete run-through. Then painstaking, bar-by-bar polishing. Then a final run-through.

“Precision comes first,” he tells his singers. “Schmaltz comes--if at all--last. . . .

“Too loud, too soon. Control, always control. . . .”

“Who doesn’t have a pencil? Pencil! Mark it. . . .”

“You crescendo in the middle (of the note), got it? You crescendo to the middle and away from the middle. Always the middle. . . .

“ ‘Ee-ah. Not ‘ee- yah . . . .’ ”

“No accents! No accents!”

A pause.

“Not good enough,” he says.

“I formed the group because this is, after all, my life’s work,” Hickok said during an interview later. “When I came to the university it was with the understanding that I come both as an administrator and as a practicing musician.”

Hickok led choirs in New York and North Carolina as part of his teaching at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, the Manhattan School of Music and the North Carolina School of the Arts, where he became dean of the school of music.

He was dean of the School of Fine Arts of the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, before coming to UCI last December as dean of the school of fine arts.

Hickok said he auditioned about 60 singers over a period of two months before selecting his present group, all of whom are professionals. He plans ultimately to enlarge the group to 32 and to add a chamber orchestra at some concerts.

As of now, however, only one concert--Friday’s--has been announced.

“But we have tentative dates for a three-concert series in 1989-90,” Hickok said. “Then, (we will) expand to five or six in the following year, which will be the year the Irvine Theater opens.”

The Camerata operates on a $20,000 budget provided by University research funds. “The organization operates under the auspices of the university,” he said. “Its personnel is for the most part not otherwise associated with the university. We will be working on development plans to expand the budget.”

Hickok feels that “a chorus of this size is capable of doing just about everything” except large choral works such as the Berlioz or Verdi requiems.

He plans in later concerts to offer a cappella works by such Romantic composers as Brahms, Mendelssohn and Schumann.

“They wrote a great deal of literature that is almost never heard,” he said. “We’ll be delving into that as we go along.

But initially the emphasis will be on early repertory, which presents challenges to most singers today.

“There is a great deal of gradual chiseling as you work into a repertory. Sometimes you’re exaggerating certain things in order later to pare them down.

“The main thing they need to learn is the kind of vocal and musical control that in particular the Renaissance and early Baroque literature requires,” he said. “That is a kind of control within a fairly limited dynamic range. You never have huge fortissimos or very sudden changes in dynamics.

“Also, it takes a very definite kind of vocal control. You’re getting a very pure kind of tone that this type of repertory needs, which can be summed up in a negative way as an absence of extreme vibrato.”

Particularly crucial is the correct perception of rhythm.

“The whole general attitude toward rhythm as it is normally taught these days is completely foreign to the rhythmic nature of Renaissance and early Baroque music in which (as originally written) there were no bar lines and therefore no bar-line accents,” he said. “So you have irregular phrases within one voice part, then irregularities in going from one voice part to another part.

“The life of this music depends on the integrity of each of these lines standing on its own. If you enforce rhythmic uniformity on a line, you’ve violated the style.”

Indeed, while the music of the period is “very simple” in terms of harmonic structure and tonality, “where the complexity comes in is in . . . the whole rhythmic life of the piece.”

“You’re constantly working on the shape of each voice part independently, so that each voice part has its own integrity as opposed to the others. At the same time, you need to respect and reinforce the rhythmic nature of that style, which is in fact, very complex.”

For all the technical emphasis, however, the music “is very expressive,” Hickok said. “But the expression grows out of the musical structure rather than the heavy interpretive layers that performers might put on it.

“Of course, that is, to an extent, my own personal point of view. As a performer, I believe it is my first duty to make clear the structure of the music. Your interpretation is really the subtleties with which you pursue the structure, rather than deciding upon some heavy-handed emotional message that you try to force onto the structure.

“I believe there is an audience for this music,” he added. “There always has been wherever I’ve gone. (But) it’s an audience that has to be developed over a period of time.”

Robert Hickok will conduct the inaugural concert of the Irvine Camerata at 8 p.m. on Friday at the Fine Arts Concert Hall on the UC Irvine campus. Works by Victoria, Lassus, Palestrina, Byrd and others will be sung by the 24-member ensemble. Tickets: $8, general; $7, senior citizens. Information: (714) 856-6616. BALLET GUESTS: Joffrey Ballet dancers Tina LeBlanc and Edward Stierle will be guests with Ballet Pacifica when the Laguna Beach-based company opens its 1989-90 season on Sept. 2.

LeBlanc and Stierle will dance Petipa’s “Don Quixote” pas de deux and appear with the company in the Third Act of Petipa’s “The Sleeping Beauty.” Also on the program will be the first performance of Israel El Gabriel’s “Solitude,” set to the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.

The concert will begin at 8 p.m. at the Irvine Bowl in Laguna Beach. Information: (714) 642-9275.