Review: Holiday selections a tapestry of sounds
By Clarke Bustard, Richmond Times-Dispatch
December 12, 2006

Choral concerts in the holiday season aren't like those at any other time of year -- not just because they celebrate Hanukkah and Christmas but because they usually embrace a millennium or so of musical style.

The Western Wind's "Holiday Light" program at the University of Richmond ranged from medieval chant and Renaissance polyphony to early American shape-note hymns, spirituals and vocal arrangements that might have wandered out of The Manhattan Transfer songbook.

The six voices -- sopranos Kristina Boerger and Laura Christian, countertenor William Zukof, tenors Todd Frizzell and Richard Slade and baritone Elliot Z. Levine -- negotiated the program's twists and turns stylishly, sensitively and sometimes with unexpected showmanship. . . .

Cesar Alejandro Carrillo's setting of the "Ave Maria" was a standout. So, in a radically different way, was Gayla D. Morgan's treatment of "Silver Bells," complete with Christmastime-in-the-city street noise.