For its holiday concerts, the a cappella vocal ensemble Chanticleer will perform Gregorian chants and Renaissance music, along with classical works and traditional and modern carols.
Joel Simon
For the vocal ensemble Chanticleer, this season brings 10 days of Christmas.
The 12-member male a cappella group is set for 10 holiday concerts between Thanksgiving and Christmas in its home base of San Francisco Bay Area and across the country, including a concert on Dec. 8, once again this year at Orchestra Hall, instead of the Fourth Presbyterian Church, a frequent locale in the past.
Chanticleer has performed a dozen times at the Ravinia Festival since 1997. But it is best known in the Chicago area for its Christmas concerts, which have been an annual tradition since 2000 (except during the COVID-19 shutdown in 2020).
The holidays are a season of celebration, and for the Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble, that’s especially the case. “We love coming to Chicago, and every year, our Christmas tour starts on the East Coast, and we wind our way back,” said Music Director Tim Keeler. “We would never miss a stop in Chicago.”
A big change for Chanticleer came with the August 2020 appointment of Keeler as the ensemble’s sixth artistic leader. He sang with the group in 2017-2018 and served as conductor of the men’s choir at the University of Maryland, where he completed his doctorate in choral conducting. “Nobody had a playbook for COVID, so in some ways, it was a level playing field, but it was crazy to start a new job in the middle of it all,” he said.
In 2022, Chanticleer released “On a Clear Day,” with works by Mason Bates, Augusta Read Thomas and others. The disc consists mostly of works commissioned by the group in the last 10-15 years that it had not previously recorded. Also included were compositions by composers, Stephen Paulus and Steven Sametz. “The Chanticleer [music] library is extensive,” Keeler said. “One of the thrills for me as music director is going through the filing cabinets and finding all these amazing pieces by some really brilliant composers.”
For its 2026 tour, Chanticleer will most likely program songs from latest holiday-themed disc “Joy to the World,” released Oct. 31, 2025, by Delos. The disc consists of traditional Christmas carols and new works by Lowell Mason, Sarah Quartel, Michael Praetorius, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Cristóbal de Morales, Henry Gauntlett, John Jacob Niles, Steven Sametz, John Francis Wade, Franz Xaver Gruber and Richard Rodgers.
Founded in 1978 by singer and musicologist Louis Botto, Chanticleer has typically combined Renaissance music with contemporary repertoire, including a vast array of arrangements and works it has commissioned. Along the way, it has received such honors as the Dale Warland/Chorus America Commissioning Award and the ASCAP/Chorus America Award for Adventurous Programming. “Finding those nuggets of continuity across the centuries is really exciting,“ Keeler said. ”And one of the great ways to do that is to contrast early music with contemporary music.”
This is an updated version of an article that was previously published on Experience CSO, a predecessor site of Inside the Music.
