Houston Chamber Choir to sing Billy Joel, Beatles and Bach at Saturday show

In 1942, the BBC created “Desert Island Discs,” a weekly radio program that asks notable figures from all walks of British life to select a handful of items, mostly recordings, they’d want in hand if stranded in such a remote locale — music, in other words, they couldn’t live without.

“Desert Island Playlist,” Houston Chamber Choir’s concert Saturday at South Main Baptist Church, borrows this line of thinking. It’s a whimsical idea that conceals a serious purpose.

“My feeling as we were doing this season was that, in this time when anxiety is running high and we're feeling that things are just about to get more than we can handle, it would be a good idea for us to return to the familiar, to things that we know and love and enjoy,” says Robert Simpson, the choir’s founder and artistic director.

In Saturday’s case, the songs were selected by the choir members and staff; the audience at their September concert, a tribute to the British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams; and visitors to the choir’s website. Simpson wanted to create a program where the audience could “just take a deep breath and say, ‘Ah yes, this is why I fell in love with choral music,’” he says.

Suggestions came pouring in. According to Simpson, multiple people requested Gregorio Allegri’s “Miserere mei,” which — as the story goes — was once known only to those who heard the Sistine Chapel choir until a teenage Mozart heard it twice and transcribed it from memory. Others put in for Randall Thompson’s “Alleluia,” a more modern pillar of the choral repertoire originally composed in 1940.

At more than a dozen pieces, the final program shows off the choir’s eclectic capabilities, ranging from numbers by Billy Joel and the Beatles to Johann Sebastian Bach and the contemporary composers Ēriks Ešenvalds and Bob Chilcott. Arranging them in the proper order was almost as challenging as deciding which pieces to include and which to leave for another day, explains Simpson, noting that future installments of the Desert Island concept are almost sure to follow. 

“It's almost a kaleidoscopic approach, that you turn a little bit and the crystals go from blues and golds into oranges and yellows,” he says. “You just find yourself turning that kaleidoscope so that it's a different kind of view that you're seeing, but made up of the same kinds of basic elements. I'm happy with the way that this all seems to be flowing together.”

Involving the audience, as he had done at the Vaughan Williams concert, was also a priority. Simpson chose Mozart’s “Ave verum,” a piece by an “indispensable composer” he thought would be relatively easy for the crowd to sing along.

“The love of this music is also a participatory love,” he says. “We love singing this music, and I wanted the audience to have the chance to do that. And it is a piece that is very well-known to a lot of people, and it is not technically difficult, so that those who haven't sung for a while will still feel as if it's not asking more of them than they can offer. It just seemed to fit.”

One more advantage of a program like this is that it makes an ideal calling card for the choir, a comprehensive demonstration of both their technical gifts and musical artistry. Once introduced to songs that have come to mean so much to the singers, the thinking goes, those who hear them for the first time will come to love them as well.

“These pieces are pieces that our audience has reflected on as pieces that made them love choral music, and they want to hear it again,” Simpson says. “This would be the kind of concert that probably would, for those who haven't heard a lot choral music, give those individuals a chance to hear pieces that in the future will become their longtime favorites.”

Chris Gray is a Galveston-based writer.