Meredith Monk and Kitka review: ravishing

The Friend Center for the Arts at the JCCSF presents MEREDITH MONK AND KITKA IN CONCERT: VOCAL ALCHEMY Kanbar Hall, Sunday, May 15 at 7 pm In their first collaborative concert, Meredith Monk and Kitka will perform World Premieres of Monk's Quiltingand Phantom Voices alongside West Coast Premieres of vocal music from The Politics of Quiet, American Archeology #1; Roosevelt Island and Quarry. Meredith Monk and Kitka in Concert: Vocal Alchemy Venue: Kanbar Hall, JCCSF , 3200 California Street, SanFrancisco Date: Sunday May 15, 2011 7 pm Tickets: $32-$41 Box Office: 415.292.1233 or http://www.jccsf.org/arts Photo: Peter Ellenby / SF

Because so much of her music is created to be performed by herself or her ensemble, Meredith Monk is a composer with a distinctive sound - not only a stylistic fingerprint, but also a recognizable sonority. One of the many delights of Sunday's ravishing concert in Kanbar Hall at the San Francisco Jewish Community Center was the chance to hear that music in new tonal garb.

The occasion was a collaboration between Monk and Kitka, the Bay Area's eight-member women's vocal ensemble best known for its electrifying treatment of traditional Balkan music. The combination was both illuminating and slightly startling, like hearing a full program by an unusual cover band.

What Kitka brought to this music, in a program that ranged across nearly 40 years' worth of repertoire, was a new and striking physicality of sound. Monk's wordless extended vocal techniques - a collection of whoops, croons, clicks and arcane trills - are rooted in the body, but there's also something abstractly formal about them in performance.

The singers of Kitka brought the guttural earthiness of their practice into the mix, with wonderful results. The ripe harmonies of the selections from "Quarry" emerged as evocative as ever, but now there were surface irregularities to complicate and enrich the textures.

The duet "Hocket" (from "Facing North") sounded less austere and more urgent as performed by Caitlin Tabancay Austin and Leslie Bonnett than when Monk performs it with one of her regular collaborators.

Monk was on hand as well, bringing her brand of puckish vigor to a number of solo selections (both unaccompanied and with piano), and joining the ensemble for music from her landmark 1991 opera "Atlas." To hear the wit and inventiveness of the excerpt "Choosing Companions" was to be struck again by sorrow that the piece has never been revived.

The evening ended on a note of glorious melancholy, with "Mieke's Melody #5," a heartbreakingly lovely choral excerpt from "Impermanence." It was done with just the right blend of vocal heft and luminous weightlessness.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/music/article/Meredith-Monk-and-Kitka-review-ravishing-2371535.php#ixzz25icz7YhD