ARTS Tuesday, October 17, 1989 The Michigan Daily Page 5 Rare birds sing Vocal group Chanticleer ruled the roost Sunday BY GREGORI ROACH There is bad choral music and there is choral music that could be considered OK or even pretty good, but a performance of world class standards is a somewhat rare thing. Well, like a sighting of Halley's Comet or finding truffles in your backyard, a performance of this cal- iber made it to Rackham Auditorium Sunday night thanks to the group Chanticleer. True to their reputation, their concert repertoire spanned from the 16th Century to a piece composed in 1988. The first half of the program got off to a shaky start when partway through Domine, ne in furore (Psalm 6), the four part polyphony stumbled upon itself and took a few measures to straighten out - but that was the only real glitch of this two hour aural delight. Their inter- pretation of Tallis' Tunes for Arch- bishop Parker's Psalter was genius with diverse tempi and dynamics for the nine different tunes, all the while keeping the ensemble tight and well balanced. The true musicianship of the group was revealed in Three Psalms, set by the contemporary English classical composer Kenneth Leighton in 1974. The structure of the settings was almost hymn-like in style but the harmonies were in- tense and somewhat dissonant. The delicate shifts from chord to chord were precise and artfully executed, leaving no doubt that this was ex- actly what the composer had envi- sioned. Highlighting the evening's per- formance was the presentation of a new piece commissioned by Chanti- It traversed from the sublime to the ridiculous to the deathly serious all in a ten minute frame, and the only thing that overshadowed the imagination of the work was the performance it- self.... Strange things were happening in Rackham Sunday night! cleer, the Plymouth Music Series,. the Gregg Smith Singers, and the Oratorio Society of Washington with a grant from the National En- dowments for the Arts. (How does Senator Jesse Helms feel about con- temporary music?!) With a Poet's Eye consists of five poems written by five poets on five different pieces of visual art (sort of like Mus- sorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, but not really). It traversed from the sublime to the ridiculous to the deathly serious all in a ten minute frame, and the only thing that over- shadowed the imagination of the work was the performance itself. Slight but timely dramatics left you knowing what the composer thought of the poets' work and what the po- ets thought of the original artists. Strange things were happening in Rackham Sunday night! On the lighter side, the renditions of the English folk song Oh,Wally,Wally and the spiritual Steal Away, with their respective counter-tenor solos, were almost sur- real in their beauty and texture. King Chanticleer brought the house to an uproar with the story of the King of the Barnyard, a quite cocky rooster, and the hysterical imitations of his subjects. Out of This World and the encore Let's Do It were high spirited vocal jazz numbers that swung with the likes of Glenn Miller and left ev- erybody on an upbeat note. The only complaint heard float- ing through the lobby of Rackham after the concert was that the 12 men who are Chanticleer responded to the standing ovations with only one en- core, but all this seemed to confirm that on their next tour through Ann Arbor, the lines for tickets may be a bit longer. A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami; trans- lated by Alfred Birnbaum Kodansha International Hardcover/$18.95 "It was a short one-paragraph item in the morning edition." So begins A Wild Sheep Chase. This doesn't have much to do with the rest of the novel. "This has all got to be, patently, the most unbelievable, the most ridiculous story I have ever heard." So it goes about halfway through. This is more like it. First, there is the title - shouldn't it be a wild goose chase? Second, there is the subject matter - a sheep with a star on its back, a sheep that does not exist, and even if it did exist, wouldn't be living in Japan. There is the hero: 30 years old, an unambitious partner in an unambitious advertising firm. There is his girlfriend: totally unremark- able except that her ears stop the spinning of the earth and cause the plaster in a French restaurant to rip- ple. There is the Rat, the Sheep Pro- fessor, the Sheep Man, "the girl who'd sleep with anyone," the chauf- feur who knows God's phone num- ber - which by some miracle of modern telecommunications tech- nology is never busy. You get the picture. It's weird. It's not particularly traditional, either. The setting is rootless, for one thing - neither the hero nor his girlfriend have names (recalling Daphne DuMaurier's Rebecca, in which the heroine remains consis- tently and annoyingly unnamed; classic or no, names are always nice), and if it weren't for the Japanese place names, they could be anywhere, even Canada. The hero is an average, unambi- tious man. His wife has left him and his life, for the most part, is excep- tionally ordinary. His girlfriend is beautiful beyond description when she shows her ears, which is not often. Life continues to be excep- tionally ordinary until the hero is summoned by an exceptionally ex- traordinary man for an exceptionally extraordinary mission. He is given one month and several hundred thou- sand yen to find a sheep with a star on its back. The hero is led on a wild goose - no, sorry, sheep - chase to the island of Hokkaido. There his girlfriend leaves him and he finds... Well, let's just say, what- ever it is, it's exceptional. A Wild Sheep Chase is damn fun to read. A little confused sometimes, but certainly entertaining. In terms of genre, the book wan- ders all over the place. It is a mys- tery, a romance, an adventure story, a social commentary, a suspense novel, a philosophical tale, and, ev- ery so often, science fiction from the Douglas Adams school of average- person-gets-involved-with-some- thing-definitely-not-average-and-pos- sibly-from-outer-space writing. There is one constant, besides the utter unbelievability of the whole escapade, and that is loss. The hero loses his wife, his girlfriend, nearly his sanity; he goes back to his hometown to deliver a message and discovers that the beach has been filled in and replaced with apartments and business complexes and artificial turf. There is still an old jetty, but what good is a jetty without an ocean? Modern Japan, the hero says sarcastically. Sorry, Charlie, but reality hurts. Perhaps that's why the book spends some time trying to get away from it. But just when you think it has gone completely over the edge and beyond anything bearing any resem- blance to reality, it jumps back to modern life. The hero is, after all, a real person, with real feelings and real problems, despite one very un- real sheep with an unreal coffee-col- ored star on its broad unreal back. And Hokkaido is a real place, with real snow and real sheep farms and real people in its real cities. - Sheep is anchored in reality, but still manages to float off into the outer regions of strangeness once in a while. That's OK. It keeps us.sane. There is loss, there is darkness, there is an explosion on the moun- tain in Hokkaido. A sheep dies. A man dies. A cat lives. The book is unreal, extraordinary, exceptional, about average people and average places and something else. Murakami is probably unlike any other Japanese author you've ever read. Forget what you learned about Mishima - this is different. -Cindy Rosenthal Read Jim Poniewozik Every law ~ cZbe £irbiguu i1i Is an affirmative action employer. THE COLOR OF MONEj BURGER 520 E. Liberty NEW HOURS M-W to 1:00 am. Th-Sa to 2:30 am. We've expanded our 5per person gets you an unlimited weekend lift ticket, and we'll throw in Friday night's skiing absolutely free. This special rate, available to groups of 20 or more, gives you 33 hours of skiing! ! Turn your free Friday into a fabulous ski weekend. Let us assist you in locating area motels who offergeat weekend lodging rates. We'll even provide a complimentary lift ticket for_ the group leader with every 30 paid. Get organized and get skiing ... call Randy today for more informa- tion at 1-800-321-4637 ' or 1-616-378-2911.. CRYSTAL MOUNTAIN RESORT M-l4i4Th % ondc M 49, Counseling Services Groups/ Fall Term, 1989 1. Adult Children of Alcoholic/Dysfunctional Families Mondays, 3-5:00 p.m 2. Dream Focused Therapy Group Tuesdays, 3-5:00 p.m. 3. Black Graduate Women's Support/Therapy Group Wednesdays, 6-8:00 p.m 4. Black Graduate Male Support Group Time to be arranged 5. Coping As An African American Student on the U-M Campus Time to be arranged 6. Women's Eating Disorders Therapy Group Mondays, 11:10-12:30 p.m For further information or to join any of the above groups, please call Counseling Services 764-8312. Enrollment limited. Self-Help Groups meeting at Counseling Services 1. Campus Chapter of Alanon Tuesdays, 12 noon 2. Campus Chapter of Overeaters Anonymous Fridays, 12 noon The "Green" starts at $5.00 an hour. But there's more!