The 12-man vocal ensemble Chanticleer sings everything from medieval polyphonic works to 21st century compositions, all with impeccable intonation, pitch-perfect harmonies and soaring range.

The reward for the group’s command of diverse material, said Matthew Oltman, music director and singer, comes after a concert. “Someone will come up to you and say ‘This was my favorite piece.’ Then someone else will come and say a favorite piece, and it’s something very different,” he said. What the 31-year-old ensemble strives for is a program where “every piece means something.”

The singers return to Baylor University for a Distinguished Artists Series concert at 7:30 tonight at Roxy Grove Hall.

Chanticleer

Performance: 7:30 tonight at Roxy Grove Hall on the Baylor University campus.

Tickets: $15, $10 for Baylor students, faculty and staff. Call 710-3571 for ticket information.

Chanticleer

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Tonight’s program spans 15th century compositions to songs by contemporary composers such as Chen Yi, Mason Bates and Michael McGlynn, but its focal piece is Stephen Sametz’s “in time of*,” a work based on an e.e. cummings poem.

The group commissioned the work more than a decade ago and finds its meaning an enduring one. “That became the cog upon which we built the program,” Oltman said. “It explores universal themes: humanity’s journey through life. War. Peace. Love. Loss . . . I think this tends to be one of the more profound programs we’ve done.”

The San Francisco-based singers come to Waco in the middle of a fall tour offering a strong music and choral education component, with performances at youth choral festivals and music schools. It’s intended to celebrate the 10th anniversary of a non-competitive youth choral festival that Chanticleer started.

The ensemble uses such contacts with young singers as a way to encourage choral singing in places where the arts often get a short end of the stick. “We are sort of re-enforcers of what (young singers) are doing,” Oltman said.

Oltman said the most difficult pieces for Chanticleer sometimes are ones that require layers of interpretation. He cited “Lamentatio sanctae matris ecclesiae Constantinopolitanae,” a work on tonight’s program, as an example.

“It’s written on so many different levels,” he explained. “There’s the level of a mother lamenting the death of her son. The Latin text is a lament filled with Old Testament references about Jerusalem. The imagery conjured up could be about Christ, but the real reason for the poem was to engender people to crusade and win back Constatinople. Where do you even begin to interpret something like this?”

Chanticleer last sang in Waco in 1999 and Oltman has a fond Waco memory from then. Chanticleer was performing a work based on a medieval mystery play written in an unfamiliar, vernacular Latin. The singer was working on that difficult text before the concert and went outside to a spot on the banks of Lake Brazos to polish his lines.

“I remember sitting there under a tree by the river as I sang over that Latin again and again,” he recalled. “It was so pretty there.”

choover@wacotrib.com

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