At the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, May 3.
The Met's Engelhard Court, part of the newly expanded American Wing, is a roughly cube-shaped room, several stories high, all marble and glass and stone. It is an incredibly live space, so reverberant that sound takes five or six seconds to decay into silence. In other words, it's actually not ideal for a concert. The space swallows up finer points of articulation and enunciation, turning everything into a beautifully resonant but undeniably muddy wash of sound.
The singers in Chanticleer compensated as best they could like the pros they are. They must have been crisping every consonant to make the lyrics remotely legible and hitting some of the faster passages staccato to keep the line from running into one long gliss. That worked on some pieces more than others, but it was all still beautiful. And to be honest, an overly reverberant space can be a fun novelty. Hearing the music crescendo to fortissimo, cut abruptly, and then linger there, like perfume, for an impossibly long time can be downright magical, which is something I associate with Chanticleer anyway.
Much Review About Nothing 