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The holiday season is kicking off next weekend with a first-ever performance at the Westhampton Beach Performing Arts Center of a Grammy-award winning a cappella group.
At 8 p.m. on December 5, the 12 male voices of Chanticleer, a San Francisco-based choral group, will fill the auditorium as the group presents its holiday concert program, which includes pieces like “Ave Maria,” “Angels We Have Heard On High,” “Hark the Herald Angels Sing” and other holiday songs.
Clare Bisceglia, the executive director of the Performing Arts Center, said she booked the group more than a year ago with an eye to presenting a holiday concert that would be “absolutely spectacular.”
“There’s no finer way to set the stage for the holiday season,” Ms. Bisceglia said. “Their holiday show is the creme de la creme of their repertoire.”
Chanticleer, which is named after the “clear-singing” rooster in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales,” kicks off their intense holiday tour season on November 28. They will perform 26 concerts, with stops in California, Chicago, the Washington, D.C., area and around New York City, including six at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the one in Westhampton Beach.
“Christmas is quite a heavy schedule for us,” said Matthew Oltman, the musical director of Chanticleer. Mr. Oltman sang with the group for 11 seasons before taking over as musical director in 2008.
Chanticleer is an all-male a cappella ensemble that performs a wide range of musical arrangements from chants to jazz to modern music to pieces from the Renaissance period.
“It’s a variety of things literally spanning a millennium,” Mr. Oltman said. “We do sing a great number of styles of music from so many different time periods. It’s so wildly different.”
The group has won two Grammy awards. The “Colors of Love” CD won a Grammy in 2000 for best small ensemble performance. The group won again in 2003 for classical best contemporary composition and best small ensemble performance for the “Lamentations and Praises” album.
Chanticleer was founded in 1978 in San Francisco by Louis Botto, who also served as the group’s musical director until his death in 1997. At first, the group was comprised of nine men singing only vocal music from the medieval and Renaissance period. Traditionally, that genre was performed only by men, according to the group’s history on its website.
The number of men in the group fluctuated over the years, but by the early 1990s it seemed to be fixed at 12 permanent members whose ages range from the mid-20s to the mid-40s. That number is large enough to round out the sound of an a cappella group, but also small enough not to require a conductor, Mr. Oltman said. More than 100 men have been Chanticleer singers.
Chanticleer performed its first concert the same year it was founded. In 1981, the group embarked on its first national and European concert tours. Now, the globe-trotting group travels between 23 and 25 weeks out of the year, performing concerts in the United States, Europe and Asia. Next year, the group will be performing in Slovakia for the first time. “We’re always excited to tour new places,” Mr. Oltman said.
Even though the Chanticleer singers have given concerts in the Philippines, Paris and in Hong Kong, they’ve never performed on the East End. Not even Alan Reinhardt, 32, who grew up in East Meadow.
Mr. Reinhardt attended the State University of New York at Potsdam and the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Four years ago, he packed his bags and moved from New York City to San Francisco to join Chanticleer.
Mr. Reinhardt attended his first Chanticleer concerts a few years before he joined the group. After attending a New York City performance, he said in a recent interview he decided to pursue becoming a singer in the group.
“It blew me away. I had a front-row seat,” he said, adding that he had a good feeling about making the cut because he had the kind of voice the group was looking for.
Even though he has travelled the world with Chanticleer, Mr. Reinhardt’s favorite concerts are the ones performed at the Metropolitan Museum in New York City.
“It’s always great to come home,” he said.
The group will be performing six concerts at the Metropolitan Museum over three days, November 30 to December 3, and will also sing for a fifth time on NBC’s “Today Show” before the Westhampton Beach performance.
In between tours, the group rehearses, performs concerts in the San Francisco area, does educational outreach in schools, and records albums at a rate of about one CD per year, Mr. Oltman said. Chanticleer has recorded more than 30 albums in its 32-year existence.
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