Houston Chamber Choir celebrates Desert Island Playlist, Songs of America in new season

Bob Simpson has a knack for naming the Houston Chamber Choir’s seasons. After “Sing Out the New Day,” which expressed the hope and optimism of returning to live audiences after months in digital limbo, the choir’s founder and artistic director sought repertoire that reflected his Grammy-winning ensemble’s love of singing without health and safety protocols lingering in the background.

Hence, “A Heart for the Choral Art.”

“Although it’s tricky to predict the future, I’m going into this season feeling as if, for the first time in several seasons, we’re able to just concentrate on the art and open ourselves to the music that we love to make and just fill our hearts with the choral art,” he says. “This is really a return to what made us want to be musicians in the first place and a season celebrating the diversity and the exciting range of music that the chamber choir likes to undertake.”

The Sept. 24 season opener honors the sesquicentennial of British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams’ birth with what Simpson calls “one of the all-time great masterpieces of the choral literature,” the Mass in g minor for double choir. Other works include a setting of the “Old Hundredth” hymn as heard at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation and pieces by mentors Charles Villiers Stanford and Maurice Ravel. Simpson credits the latter with nudging Vaughn Williams toward crafting a distinctly British musical language.

“Beyond his own contributions as a composer, we owe him a debt of gratitude for his ability to synthesize the English repertoire in such a way that it gave birth to Britten and all the great works that have come since his time,” he says. “He’s really kind of the fountainhead for rebirth of English music in the mid-20th century.”

On Oct. 29, the scene shifts to Miller Outdoor Theatre for a free concert based on historian Jon Meacham and Tim McGraw’s 2019 book “Songs of America: Patriotism, Protest, and the Music That Made a Nation.” Reading the book “crystallized in my mind the fact that American history can be very effectively chronicled through the music of this great nation, from the pre-Revolutionary War’s protest and songs, to music throughout our history,” Simpson says.

The next concert, “Desert Island Playlist” on Nov. 19, is a spin on the popular parlor game in which people choose the records they’d most like to be stranded with; both choir and audience will help choose the evening’s repertoire. Beyond Robert L. Pearsall’s “Lay a Garland,” which his choir recently sung at its “Once Upon a Time” concert, Simpson defers on his own choices but says narrowing down which selections make the cut may prompt an encore in a future season.

“It’s very easy for me to become so consumed with the fine points of choral music and repertoire, looking into the unilluminated corners of the field to find things that maybe people don’t know yet, and lose the fact that our joy in singing and our joy in hearing choral music is so enhanced by those pieces that we just love and always want to have with us,” he says.

After the choir’s first holiday concert since 2019 at Houston convent Villa de Matel (Dec. 10-11) and its annual Hear the Future invitational (Jan. 29), the next two performances both place topical sociopolitical issues in a musical context: environmental catastrophe in Sara Kirkland Snyder’s Mass for the Endangered, featuring innovative Houston instrumental ensemble Loop38; and artistic inclusion in Ancestors’ Dream (March 11), for which guest conductor Anthony Trecek-King will lead the choir in a program of historically overlooked Black composers, including Florence Price, Nathanial Dett and Harry Burleigh.

The finale, “Holy Smoke and the Flame” (May 6), welcomes Iron & Wine, aka Sam Beam, to perform both solo and with the choir. Although this will be its first venture into the indie-folk realm, the idea itself is not all that far-fetched: Beam’s sister is married to Simpson’s son, and the singer-songwriter and the choir director have been batting the idea around for years.

“Sam himself is such a natural performer, and I love his poetry and his music,” Simpson says. “This is going to be a family affair, but everybody in the audience will be part of our family, too.”

Season subscriptions are now on sale, starting around $200. Single-concert tickets go on sale Aug. 5; see houstonchamberchoir.org for details.

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.