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ST. PETERSBURG - In the beginning was the text. Nobody exemplifies that rubric of choral singing better than the Dale Warland Singers, who gave a transcendent concert Wednesday night at First Presbyterian Church.
The 40-voice chorus from St. Paul, Minn., on a farewell tour in its 31st and final season, has a somewhat austere sound that derives from a rigorous approach to the words, with rare cohesion on the vowels and razor-sharp enunciation of the consonants. Warland and his choristers achieved an uncanny combination of celestial polyphony and crispness in the opening two works, Howard Hanson's A Prayer of the Middle Ages and Eric Whitacre's Lux Arumque.
Like another Minnesotan, novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Warland Singers bring a clarity and elegance of phrasing to the American language, heard in their performance of two Stephen Paulus settings, We Gather Together and The Old Church. Paulus has frequently composed for the group, and his understanding of its sound was on display in the splendid encore, his chantlike Pilgrims' Hymn.
Herbert Howells' memorial to John F. Kennedy, Take Him, Earth, For Cherishing, was a high point, beginning simply with unison singing but quickly becoming complex, including dramatic dissonance.
John Rutter, the popular and often glib English choral composer and conductor, does not write the kind of music the analytical Warland tends to favor. But Rutter's Hymn to the Creator of Light, written as a memorial to Howells, is an exception. The singers gave an irresistible reading of the double motet on a variety of ways of looking at "light," from sunshine to "flame of fire" to "the light invisible and intellectual."
The performance of Morton Lauridsen's greatest hit, O Magnum Mysterium, was striking for the sensual "oooom" on the end of "mysterium." The women's voices were notably good in a memorable Oh, Shenandoah. The Minnesotans even managed to swing a bit on the spiritual By and By.
The Dale Warland Singers repeat their program at 7:30 p.m. today, University of South Florida Theatre 1, 4202 E Fowler Ave., Tampa; (813) 974-2323. $20, $10 seniors, $5 students.