Western Wind Whips Up Superb Vocals

The Western Wind has blown in from New York for the CSU Summer Arts program at Cal State Long Beach. Sunday evening the veteran a cappella ensemble demonstrated its versatility and virtuosity with a stunning concert in the Gerald R. Daniel Recital Hall.

In business since 1969, the group still includes two founding members, countertenor William Zukof and baritone Elliot Levine. Sopranos Phyllis Elaine Clark and Kathy Theil, and tenors Neil Farrell and Michael Steinberger complete a sextet that sings with deceptive lightness, rhythmic acuity, stylish affection and supreme textual clarity.

From the antique end of its repertory came five madrigals by Luca Marenzio. Other groups may occupy the stylistic higher ground in this music but few give its labyrinthine lines so much character, rising to individual emotional crests within a perfectly calibrated ensemble world.

The Western Wind is also an influential champion of living composers, and Peter Schickele, Matthew Harris, James Bassi and ensemble member Levine--New Yorkers all--contributed varied and engaging settings of e.e. cummings. Another New Yorker, Tania Leon, was represented by three self-consciously Cuban-flavored pieces, though none as seductive as Alejandro Garcia Caturla’s two sones, “El caballo blanco” and “Canto de los cafetales.”

In any language--or no language at all, in the case of Leon’s spirited, sibilant “Bambula”--the Western Wind communicates easily, through expressive vocal color and articulate phrasing as much as the words. The group really inhabits the music it sings, exuberant in spirit but classically balanced.

Framing the program were sets of jazz and pop tunes, ranging from Duke Ellington’s “I’m Beginning to See the Light” to Brian Wilson’s “In My Room.” At least as dizzying in texture, nimble in rhythm and kaleidoscopic in harmony as anything else on the agenda, these arrangements provided even freer play for the Western Wind, defining vocal personalities that remained consistent--if slightly more circumspect--across the repertory board.