Something New

Concert-goers heard the other evening what was to most of them a new instrument. It was the a cappella chorus--group singing unaccompanied. Specifically, it was the Sistine Choir (TIME, Oct. 22), in its Manhattan debut. One does not think of voices without accompaniment as an instrument of rich and dramatic musical utterance. The church choir, smug, monotonous, leaves an abiding impression on the American ear. Even the best of oratorio choruses do not escape the stilted, churchy dullness. A fine operatic chorus, like that of the Metropolitan Opera Company, is not an independent unity; it works essentially in conjunction with the orchestra. There have been one or two unaccompanied ecclesiastical choruses before, and good ones (the Paulist Choristers, for instance). But it was left for the Sistine Choir to demonstrate what a remarkable instrument the a cappella chorus is. Yet it is one of the oldest of instruments; the earliest school of our music, the medieval, was exclusively one of unaccompanied voices. The name Sistine Choir is one of the oldest and most august in music.

The grey and venerable old director (Rella), garbed in ecclesiastical red, standing before his surpliced singers, signaled with his arms, and promptly, without a single instrumental note to give the pitch, sounded a full vocal chord of perfectly true intonation. The choir sang with strong and vivid nuances. The basses were marvelous, sometimes like a deep bell note; the tenors were rich and full; the treble voices, of boys and men, were of that clear, sexless beauty that is characteristic of male sopranos and altos. Sometimes in the piano passages the voices moved with the exquisite nuances of violins; then sounded great, chanted chords as incisive as those of an orchestra. The Sistine Choir upheld the grandeur of a great name.